ugh.book

158 csh, pipes, and find

(BTW, your typical TeX source file gets classified as “ascii text”

rather than “English text,” but I digress...)

words.h.~1~: ascii text

words.h: English text

Perhaps I added some comments to words.h after version 1?

But I saved the best for last:

arc.h: shell commands

Makefile: [nt]roff, tbl, or eqn input text

Both wildly wrong. I wonder what would happen if I tried to use

them as if they were the kinds of program that the ‘file’ program

assigns them?

—Alan

Shell Variables Won’t

Things could be worse for Alan. He could, for instance, be trying to use

shell variables.

As we’ve mentioned before, sh and csh implement shell variables slightly

differently. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that semantics of shell vari-

ables—when they get defined, the atomicity of change operations, and

other behaviors—are largely undocumented and ill-defined. Frequently,

shell variables behave in strange, counter-intuitive ways that can only be

comprehended after extensive experimentation.

Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1991 11:46:21 PST

From: Stanley’s Tool Works <[email protected]>

Subject: You learn something new every day

To: UNIX-HATERS

Running this script:

#!/bin/csh

unset foo

if (! $?foo ) then

echo foo was unset

else if ( "$foo" = "You lose" ) then

echo $foo