On 2008-01-04 at 16:07 -0800, Michael G Schwern wrote: > Of course, as Peter insinuated, I'm sure by now it's been rationalized as a > "feature".
In large environments, having everything always locally available on local disk is fairly recent, with cluster management systems etc. NFS is still common. I'm in an environment where I work hard to keep my shell from having to go scan places in random NFS mounts, including syncing two-line shell wrappers to a special bin-dir within my NFS homedir since then at least if the dir cache gets flushed it's flushed by me, not by dint of someone somewhere always updating something. Heck, they go into aliases so the commands are only a backup for when scripts are invoking the command-name expecting it to be in the path. Without this grotesque hackery, regular work becomes nightmarish during the business day. Caches which don't cache negative results don't tend to be effective caches. The question is whether or not a cache should be used at all. So the feature is useful in some environments but probably shouldn't be the default these days. People in such environments can learn to use it and people whose idea of Unix is a single modern computer with local disks can't conceive of set-ups different from their own and whine a lot. Bloody Linux users. (zsh has a similar feature) -Phil
