ugh.book

30 Welcome, New User!

next% mkdir foo

next% ls -Fd foo

foo/

next% rm foo/

rm: foo/ directory

next% rmdir foo/

rmdir: foo/: File exists

Here’s a way to amuse and delight your friends (courtesy of Leigh Klotz).

First, in great secret, do the following:

% mkdir foo

% touch foo/foo~

Then show your victim the results of these incantations:

% ls foo*

foo~

% rm foo~

rm: foo~ nonexistent

% rm foo*

rm: foo directory

% ls foo*

foo~

%

Last, for a really good time, try this:

% cat - - -

(Hint: press ctrl-D three times to get your prompt back!)

Online Documentation

People vote for president more often than they read printed documentation.

The only documentation that counts is the stuff that’s on-line, available at

the tap of a key or the click of a mouse. The state of Unix documentation,

and the amount by which it misses the bar, has earned its own chapter in

this book, so we’ll take this space just to point out that Unix’s man system

fails most where it is needed most: by novices.

Not all commands are created equal: some are programs invoked by a shell,

and some are built into a shell.^8 Some have their own man pages. Some

don’t. Unix expects you to know which is which. For example, wc, cp, and

ls are programs outside of the shell and have man pages. But fg, jobs, set,