From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Jul 11 19:06:34 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id TAA00440 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Sat, 11 Jul 1998 19:06:34 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from smtp03.primenet.com (root@smtp03.primenet.com [206.165.6.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA00400 for ; Sat, 11 Jul 1998 19:06:23 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tlambert@usr08.primenet.com) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp03.primenet.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id SAA05896; Sat, 11 Jul 1998 18:14:39 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr08.primenet.com(206.165.6.208) via SMTP by smtp03.primenet.com, id smtpd005830; Sat Jul 11 18:14:33 1998 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr08.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA17113; Sat, 11 Jul 1998 18:14:27 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199807120114.SAA17113@usr08.primenet.com> Subject: Re: Improvemnet of ln(1). To: cyouse@artemis.syncom.net (Charles Youse) Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1998 01:14:27 +0000 (GMT) Cc: bakul@torrentnet.com, joelh@gnu.org, dchapes@ddm.on.ca, rminnich@Sarnoff.COM, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: from "Charles Youse" at Jul 11, 98 11:46:54 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > For interactive use, alias ln to `ln -w' to warn you. If you > > change the default behavior of ln, you *will* break scripts. > > Unlike editors, ln is more likely to be used in scripts than > > interactively (well, it is so for most people). > > I fail to see how. An extra line output to stderr is going to break > scripts? Can you provide an example? ... # call subscript, save all output... a successful subscript will produce # no output... OUT=/tmp/out.$$ subscript > $(OUT} 2>&1 # postprocess output to look for errors, warnings... ... echo "The following failures occurred while processing subscript:" echo "-----------------------------------------------------------" cat ${OUT} echo "-----------------------------------------------------------" rm ${OUT} exit 1 fi > > Bottom line: backward compatibility is a good program design. > > Well, not always. Compare Windows/DOS. That's OS design, not program design. Most code can be compiled on Windows/DOS, if only because, by definition, good program design means the code is portable to diverse platfroms, including Windows/DOS. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message