From owner-freebsd-stable Sun Apr 29 23:30:38 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 B13C737B422 for ; Sun, 29 Apr 2001 23:30:33 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 29029 invoked by uid 100); 30 Apr 2001 06:30:32 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15085.1672.680397.456359@guru.mired.org> Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 01:30:32 -0500 To: "Juha Saarinen" Cc: "Mike Meyer" , "Dan Langille" , "Chris Byrnes" , Subject: RE: tail In-Reply-To: References: <15084.62729.75795.555796@guru.mired.org> 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: > :: 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. > So the butter-fingered luser must be punished? Having to live with the consequences of their own buttery fingers is punishment enough. Running tail on a file that's not ascii text - whether it's a directory, a binary, or something else - usually does strange things to the terminal, which will do. > :: 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. > In that case, tail should cause a kernel panic if you try to run it on a > directory. If you really want to wallow in pendantry, please remember that > "shooting yourself in the foot" isn't the right metaphor in this context. Considering that it's the result of being butter-fingered, it seems highly appropriate. The real issue is why should a command raise an error for no good reason. Either a kernel panic or a message is a bit extreme just because a user issued a command that someone else thinks is unusual. Until you can prove that there is no use for the output of tail on a directory, adding code to tail to generate an error in that case is silly. 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