On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 05:40:41PM +0200, Nadav Har'El wrote: > On Wed, Mar 30, 2005, guy keren wrote about "Re: A second glibc on Linux ( > there's a keren in the darkness )": > > > > On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Oron Peled wrote: > > > > > To summarize: the folk tale about avoiding commands named test (or > > > Nee, for that matter) is like trying to cure a virus with Aspirin. > > > > this is wrong, as it does not take into account the fact that a newcomer > > is sometimes accustomed to the DOS way, where '.' is always in the PATH, > > implicitly. as such, they don't think they need to use './test'. with > > other programs, they would get a 'command not found' error. with a program > > like 'test', they will get such an obscure error message that they'll have > > no idea how to even begin debugging it. > > Or worse: they don't get any error message at all. "test" with zero or one > parameters just does nothing, and returns. > I've seen this happen to at least 3 unsuspecting newbies... > > P.S. I disagree that having the current directory in the path is only the > "DOS way". It has always been the Unix way too, and I still like it to > this day. I think that many books even recommended (or perhaps even still > recommend) that non-root users have a colon starting their path, meaning > that the programs in the current directory take preference. This is useful > for programmers, but indeed is probably less useful for non-programmers, > which is why this practice fell out of favor over the years.
Nadav, of all the things you said until today, this is surely the one I least agree with you about. Can you show a concrete example of such a book? I personally prefer to explain again and again to new users here (most of which are programming students) why putting . in the path is bad and that they should "./" rather than tell them how to add it (or even, as you suggest, to make it the default). Just to give a small "proof" that I am not entirely wrong, in tcsh there are two relevant compile-time options - one is to move '.' to the end of the path and one is to omit it altogether. So enough people found it useful to add to tcsh. I am also not sure why it's so much more useful for programmers. You do not have to add './', right, but you have to add a few chars for tab completion to work (because it searches the entire path). -- Didi ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
