Eunix was designed for a PDP-7, and we are suffering from some of the design decisions made then. But the myth of windows being user friendly is just a myth; the reality is quite different. So, yes, z/OS suffers from some really bad decisions made decades ago, but so do the other systems. The prevalence of windows has as much to do with the monopolistic practices of ms as with anything else.
BTW, to what extent has z/VSE overcome the ghastly syntax of DOS JCL? -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Charles Mills [charl...@mcn.org] Sent: Thursday, November 5, 2020 12:56 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: FSUM7197 pax: invalid archive format selected It's fine that UNIX is designed for professionals but (a.) some of us are professionals at many things but have to use UNIX only occasionally; and (b.) no one is born a professional. If you make it hard for folks to get started as non-professionals, then they will gravitate elsewhere and become professionals there. That may be why Windows is a lot more common choice for desktops than is UNIX. (And why z/OS is not exactly storming the marketplace. Your COND= plaint is of course legendary.) Good software design would be newbie-friendly by default, and accommodating of professionals if one so chose. The link is amusing. Thanks. I don't hate UNIX. I am not a computer religious zealot. People pay me to use computers, and I enjoy doing so for the most part, so I do. This feature of UNIX wasted an hour of my client's time. And some of your time and Gil's. And others who read the post, shook their heads, and moved on. > IBM really goofed up by not using the GNU libraries IBM does not share their thinking with me but I suspect they wanted "real" UNIX, and GNU is of course ... Not UNIX. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of John McKown Sent: Thursday, November 5, 2020 9:21 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: FSUM7197 pax: invalid archive format selected Caution -- tacky in-line comment. On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:46 AM Charles Mills <charl...@mcn.org> wrote: > What the heck were the UNIX designers thinking when they allowed the > casual creation of a filename of -x? They were thinking that UNIX is for professionals who know what they're doing and didn't want to be "molly coddled" and protected from themselves. That's for Windows users. And, really, this is more an artifact of the Bourne shell, not the UNIX kernel. In fact, UNIX allows a file to have any characters in it other than 0x00. Mainly because it is written in C. That's freedom, which requires responsibility. Well, actually, UNIX probably allowed it because it was developed, I think, on a PDP-7 which was very memory constrained and so they didn't do a whole lot of coding to validate "reasonableness". You might enjoy this: https://secure-web.cisco.com/1-dM3BmUBAUH2sYYhQ2RsAvGkVtVKvvlmn3hdBcYfcSknMrTzVTPbBJFXPAESy6rTdpzcZacofe__Dg3GxMaZHSw_of1qimWxUcoewgghJarztW2FVxbiAdANmeTIfBI7nluNfkbyqgBMm5IamPVQQPiWFvvzDFDZHlurgt0gilfOoKRJdzjYkCtuej7AS_bid4n8H4E8jC4NV8RhuSBJze3KrS3qtoQqb1Lc8t1ZVyRSSBmB15KX5cdZ2TUKLeI78r-BWaEkfZWky7Sg7-yeQvjbW2YzZ9yDHOam26YNo8CIOVFPGeJgshgrw8XDVpZH2JmROkcuQBbWS4n9HSp-AQIQe2B3p3AywEmsrVL4dAmIeTQ_9oEj_p-v4ozuWJPILEiqw3BefiNi_i251bOEFFBBoo5NDhy5I5DlvHNGuG0ybZO8TwBBl_7mSxLIR2jQ/https%3A%2F%2Fweb.mit.edu%2F%7Esimsong%2Fwww%2Fugh.pdf The UNIX Haters Handbook. > There may be a legitimate reason why someone would want to create a file > named -x but if so, then *they* should be made to jump through some small > hoop and "escape" the name in some way. The innocent victim who stumbles > into this situation should not be the one made to jump through hoops. Will > UNIX allow the creation of a file named "rm *"? That could have some > interesting side effects. > Simple to do that: touch 'rm *' More "difficult" touch rm\ \* > > How did I inadvertently create a file named -x? I had a pax command > > pax -wzvf /my/archive.pax * > > I had an error that I thought might be solved by -x os390. Looking at the > above command I forgot that /my/archive.pax "went with" the -f and coded > > pax -wzvf -x os390 /my/archive.pax * > > That has the effect of creating an archive named -x. UNIX did not complain > or warn about that at all. (It complained about some unnamed file not being > found, presumably os390.) That is poor design IMHO. > Perhaps. But, then again, WAD. Or perhaps BAD. But the command did exactly what it was documented to do. Might as well complain, as I have, about the backwardness of COND= in JCL. I now only use // IF and it's friends for condition checking. > > Heck, if the shell is going to expand the * then it could generate a > warning "hey, did you know that one of your files has a name that looks > just like a switch?" > Hum, now that might be an interesting thing to be able to do! The BASH shell has a "shopts" builtin command to set some shell options. The GNU utilities, well most of them, have a -- options which says anything which has a leading dash after the double dash is _not_ to be interpreted as an option. But that is not the shell itself. I think it is really an artifact of the GNU version of "getopt()" https://secure-web.cisco.com/1fh7peCumBoySbrINCgCxF38dORRmcLcG9ovJZsTG_P6ZYbf54GspqjaO4xxpfRjEN_2mnhO-OOD-0B1sWdIsJzUphQbXERzLiAlKxzqUzdjjJAy0f9Bcbpvvj81r0Cg7YoTWl0djgqFaDmxy8Wt_h2tMzbIG4ydnhcpVPhAabRdYHhH0wD5mF8WnKRqOJ0OafkyaTqXClD3MSVDKZ6wNsYtJDW4ITKmD15imqXq7UqJnJs48NQnzYRWxa2kX4RM2m9_D_8PvWy_3DDOUFc0jMIr9cQ9eW0C1mXyMgtAM3sattbk4NirxErXpq0agPXni0fq3FdF_GK7EtiHxs9Xg4RDTZ9gZdA90IwGN-Wv2d2EHEDez0tM3_fL0jj7sckM-atCVu9yvP6ufTRwtOYRtf6GmHJ3sYCCeZQzdWh5Wximr5DKIAR6ZAUJuxNePw0tn/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gnu.org%2Fsoftware%2Flibc%2Fmanual%2Fhtml_node%2FUsing-Getopt.html IBM really goofed up by not using the GNU libraries, or at least their design, in z/OS UNIX. I am thinking they used base AIX. Which is hilarious because AIX has GNU ported to it and I am fairly sure every programmer uses it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
