Even more unix holy war. Was "Clinton freezes U.S. assets .."
And did I mention that in DOS you can type: dir filename /s if you suspect that filename is in a subdirectory somewhere and you want the computer to find it for you, but in unix you type: find . -name filename -print but the entertaining thing is that if you type find . -name filename find then merrily goes forth, searches for the file -- which takes an extraordinarily long time, much longer than on my DOS machine, and then, cheerfully throws away what it has found, no warnings, no error message, no explanation. find thinks to itself "Gee, the user asked me to find the file, but he did not tell me to do anything with the information, so, I guess he just wanted me to exercise the network and the hard drive for five minutes or so." And did I mention "curses" You are spared. I will not mention "curses". And did I mention SUID. Well fortunately SUID has already been mentioned by other folk in the "Clinton freezes .." thread. And did I mention that unix has no less than seven families of metasyntactic operators, each of them different from and clashing with the others, that these families follow no logical order of substitution that I can figure out. Yeah, I know, that is what makes the unix shell so powerful. It is remarkably similar to what makes a chainsaw so powerful. It is very good at cutting your fingers off. And once again, I wish to remind you that the unix "make" utility used to treat spaces as semanticly different from tabs. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.catalog.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. | jamesd@netcom.com
And did I mention that in DOS you can type: [....]
but in unix you type: [....]
ya know, there are mailing lists for people who hate unix. this isn't one of them. josh ___ The Zen of UNIX "Unix teaches us about the tranistory nature of all things, thus ridding us of samsaric attachments and hastening enlightenment. For instance, while trying to make sense of an X initialization script someone had given me, I came across a line that looked like an ordinary unix shell command with the term "exec" prefaced to it. Curious as to what exec might do, I typed "exec ls" to a shell window. It listed a directory, then proceeded to kill the shell and every other window I had, leaving the screen almost totally black with a tiny white inactive cursor hanging at the bottom to remind me that nothing is absolute and all things partake of their opposite. "In the past I might have gotten upset or angry at such an occurance. That was before I found enlightenment through Unix. Now, I no longer have attachments to my processes. Both processes and the disapperance of processes are illusory. The world is unix, unix is the world, labor ceaslessly for the salvation of all sentient beings." -Michael Travers
Sorry: I got flamed for laughing at Perry's rather silly statement that unix is as easy as DOS. They asked me to produce evidence. Since I was working on my unix Sun Sparc Station 20 at the time (with extreme reluctance), and I had just used what unix folk humorously call their command line editor, so I suffered from explosive vomiting, and vomited all over the cypherpunks mailing list. After the first bout of explosive vomit, I returned to work, whereupon the unix "High Performance" files system lost one of my files, producing the second round of explosive vomit. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.catalog.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. | jamesd@netcom.com
participants (3)
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James A. Donald -
jamesd＠com.informix.com -
joshua geller