Re: [dev] books that rock

From: Jakukyo Friel <weakish_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2015 18:27:43 +0800

On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 10:35 AM, Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe
<first.lord.of.teal_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Quoth Lee F. on Sat, Apr 25 2015 21:57 -0400:
>>
>> The UNIX Hater's Handbook. A great perspective on UNIX.
>
>
> In what way? I remember a chapter-length rant about rm(1) being
> broken because it actually removed things and some (accurate)
> complaints about X; otherwise, Dennis Ritchie's preface seemed like
> the best part.

- shells interpret '*' and other globs:
    * If programs does not interprets theses globs themselves, they cannot
      do additional checks, e.g. `rm` cannot check `*` to avoid potential
      dangerous actions.
    * If programs interprets these globs themselves, like `git` or `hg`,
      then shells' interpretation is redundant.

- Special characters like spaces, tabs, new lines are valid in file names,
  but shells are unhappy with them.

- Different UNIX ship different commands. Nowadays things are much better,
  but this problem still exist, mostly between bsd(darwin) and linux.

- Data passes through programs as strings. Sender need to encode and
  receiver need to decode. What makes things worse is there are no
  common standard strings format for interoperation.
Received on Mon Apr 27 2015 - 12:27:43 CEST