Date: Fri, 03 Oct 1997 17:36:00 +1000 From: Stephen McKay <syssgm@dtir.qld.gov.au> To: pechter@lakewood.com Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org, syssgm@dtir.qld.gov.au Subject: Re: Sysctl variables Message-ID: <199710030736.RAA06730@troll.dtir.qld.gov.au> In-Reply-To: <199710021245.IAA01691@i4got.lakewood.com> from Bill Pechter at "Thu, 02 Oct 1997 08:45:50 -0400" References: <199710021245.IAA01691@i4got.lakewood.com>
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On Thursday, 2nd October 1997, Bill Pechter wrote: >> >> So, please, no dual universes. >really, >you could use both commands in the same pipe -- for example (this is a quick >hack from memory) > >att ls | att cut -f1 -d"x" | bsd cat -n > >since the AT&T subsystem didn't do cat -n you could get the best of both >worlds on the fly. Made shell scripting interesting if you didn't >specify the universe in the command. Yes, interesting, yet in practice, I found it a nightmare. The ability to use these prefixes to change the behaviour of every command meant that people did that! So, I could write a script using normal commands and have some bozo invoke it as "att do_the_stuff" and it would fail. So, I had to be acutely aware of universe issues at all times. It was rarely a help, and always a possible problem. People were always shoving "att" or "ucb" into scripts to fix the problems caused by the "ucb" or "att" in the script further up the call hierarchy. I am so glad to see the back of it! Again though, I'm not just a rabid "Not Invented Here" guy. I've tried a lot of SysV and BSD and hybrid systems and pure BSD beat the others. I would limit the imports to very carefully selected portions. I'd import from DOS if there was anything of value there! ;-) Stephen.
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