It added a fillip that, while I was reading this, the house UNIX expert wreaked a
rm *on himself. As the book suggests,
Some Unix victims turn this filename-as-switch bug into a “feature” by keeping a file named “-i” in their directories. Type “rm *” and the shell will expand this to “rm -i filenamelist” which will, presumably, ask for confirmation before deleting each file. Not a bad solution, that, as long as you don’t mind putting a file named “-i” in every directory. Perhaps we should modify the mkdir command so that the “-i” file gets created automatically. Then we could modify the ls command not to show it.The pleasure of these criticisms is their UNIX-guru care; they're very specific about what the Better Way would be. I will be surprised if their prescriptions are possible, especially over forty years of development and use, but it would always be nice to see something better.
My mild schadenfreude about the rm error was repaid when something in the tree of user-friendly USB devices hanging off OS X ate my entire original review, slowly, so I could watch. (In hindsight, I should have pulled the whole USB chain. I am told often by lordly-patient Macheads that it 'all just works' and you can disconnect devices as you finish with them. Only, not a week ago, I disconnected a FireWire drive with insufficient etiquette. I might say that convincing users they should always go in caution is more honest than lulling them into hanging themselves. However, no permanent harm came from my recklessness, so maybe OS X is stout enough to carry off its vanity.)
URL:http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters.html
So wrote clew in
Technology.
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