Date: Tue, 01 May 2001 00:17:06 -0700 From: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com> To: juha@saarinen.org Cc: dmmiller@cvzoom.net, stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Preserving traditional Unix behavior [was RE: tail] Message-ID: <20010501001706Z.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> In-Reply-To: <KPECIILENDDLPCNIMLOFEEPDCCAA.juha@saarinen.org> References: <3AED6781.8746018D@cvzoom.net> <KPECIILENDDLPCNIMLOFEEPDCCAA.juha@saarinen.org>
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From: "Juha Saarinen" <juha@saarinen.org> Subject: RE: tail Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 07:44:08 +1200 > So the best thing to do is to keep the current behaviour for tail et al, but > make it accessible through a flag. Most of the time, that behaviour isn't > desirable, hence it should only be invoked if you really need it. I think this thread really has gone on long enough, but I'll take the liberty of expressing what I believe is the concensus view here in hopes that it lets us move on to other things: This is simply not a desirable change nor does it make good architectural sense since, as others have pointed out, there are plenty of other utilities which will produce the exact same behavior if given a directory. It would be prohibitive to add such a flag to all of them and it would not even solve the essential problem since you would still be able to cause the exact same failure mode by substituting a binary file. This utility's behavior will therefore not be changed in FreeBSD. The fact that you messed yourself up by misusing tail(1) also hardly constitutes an argument which overrides the concerns listed above and I think it's time we spent our energies more constructively by moving on to some area of genuine architectural weakness. Thanks. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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