From owner-freebsd-stable Sun Apr 29 22:15:58 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id A185B37B423 for ; Sun, 29 Apr 2001 22:15:54 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 27362 invoked by uid 100); 30 Apr 2001 05:15:53 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15084.62729.75795.555796@guru.mired.org> Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 00:15:53 -0500 To: "Juha Saarinen" Cc: "Dan Langille" , "Chris Byrnes" , Subject: RE: tail In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Juha Saarinen types: > :: tail is doing as ordered. Directories and files are the same. So it's > :: giving you the last ten lines of the file / > > Tail voss only obeyink orters??? > > Well, it's silly to do that unthinkingly. Well, yes, tail on a directory is a silly thing to do unthinkingly. But the silly one isn't tail, it's the user who issued the command without thinking. > Here's what happens on a Debian box: > > juha@cyrus:~$ tail / > tail: /: Is a directory > > More desirable behaviour, IMO. More proof that linux isn't Unix. On Unix, it's generally more important to make sure the user can shoot anything they want than it is to keep the user from shooting themselves in the foot. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message