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