On Wed, Mar 30, 2005, guy keren wrote about "Re: A second glibc on Linux ( there's a keren in the darkness )": > > On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Oron Peled wrote: > > > To summarize: the folk tale about avoiding commands named test (or > > Nee, for that matter) is like trying to cure a virus with Aspirin. > > this is wrong, as it does not take into account the fact that a newcomer > is sometimes accustomed to the DOS way, where '.' is always in the PATH, > implicitly. as such, they don't think they need to use './test'. with > other programs, they would get a 'command not found' error. with a program > like 'test', they will get such an obscure error message that they'll have > no idea how to even begin debugging it.
Or worse: they don't get any error message at all. "test" with zero or one parameters just does nothing, and returns. I've seen this happen to at least 3 unsuspecting newbies... P.S. I disagree that having the current directory in the path is only the "DOS way". It has always been the Unix way too, and I still like it to this day. I think that many books even recommended (or perhaps even still recommend) that non-root users have a colon starting their path, meaning that the programs in the current directory take preference. This is useful for programmers, but indeed is probably less useful for non-programmers, which is why this practice fell out of favor over the years. -- Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Mar 30 2005, 19 Adar II 5765 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Take my advice, I don't use it anyway. http://nadav.harel.org.il | ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
