Consistently Inconsistent 25was reported in those messages, most of those very same sysadmins came
to Unix’s defense when it was attacked as not being “user-friendly.”
Not user friendly? Unix isn’t even “sysadmin friendly”! For example:
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 88 01:39 EDT
From: Matthew P Wiener <[email protected]
To: [email protected]^4
Subject: Re: “Single keystroke”On Unix, even experienced users can do a lot of damage with “rm.” I
had never bothered writing a safe rm script since I did not remove
files by mistake. Then one day I had the bad luck of typing “!r” to
repeat some command or other from the history list, and to my horror
saw the screen echo “rm -r *” I had run in some other directory, hav-
ing taken time to clean things up.Maybe the C shell could use a nohistclobber option? This remains
the only time I have ever rm’ed or overwritten any files by mistake
and it was a pure and simple gotcha! of the lowest kind.Coincidentally, just the other day I listened to a naive user’s horror at
running “rm *” to remove the file “*” he had just incorrectly created
from within mail. Luckily for him, a file low in alphabetic order did
not have write permission, so the removal of everything stopped
early.The author of this message suggests further hacking the shell (by adding a
“nohistclobber option”) to make up for underlying failing of the operating
system’s expansion of star-names. Unfortunately, this “fix” is about as
effective as repairing a water-damaged wall with a new coat of paint.
Consistently Inconsistent
Predictable commands share option names, take arguments in roughly the
same order, and, where possible, produce similar output. Consistency
requires a concentrated effort on the part of some central body that promul-
gates standards. Applications on the Macintosh are consistent because they
follow a guidebook published by Apple. No such body has ever existed for
(^4) Forwarded to UNIX-HATERS by Michael Travers.