I had done some programming to help system administration. Part of that obtains a list of users to check in SFS. Which users I get listed is basically outside my control, and I want the program to be robust enough to handle that. Trying to understand the strange results, I realized that one of the users just happened to match a nickname in my personal NAMES file, and the QUERY (in this case) nicely iterated the command for the list of users in that nickname. Not nice when you don't want that. I felt pretty stupid that I did not disable the (apparent) default to search your NAMES file, but found that there is no such option.
I think this is broken. When you want to write robust code, it should not casually pick up a NAMES file that happens to be there. In my case it just made the output look strange and it made me lookup the syntax for Q LIMITS ALL to avoid iterating over all users. This just smells like a Trojan Horse attack around the corner. VMLINK has a NONAMES option to avoid literals to be taken as nicknames. SENDFILE and friends would enjoy that too, but I can code AT to force no NAMES resolution. So what's the right way to make this robust? Do I have to save the NAMES file and put an empty one there? Or NUCXLOAD some dummy thing as NAMEFIND ? Rob (friday is my security weasel day)
