Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!rbutterworth
From: rbutterworth@watmath.waterloo.edu (Ray Butterworth)
Newsgroups: uw.unix
Subject: Re: Catching up on News
Message-ID: <29151@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Date: 14 Sep 89 15:06:32 GMT
References: <29132@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 17

In article <29132@watmath.waterloo.edu>, sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu writes:
> ... 
> except at MFCF for historical reasons, the "yes" command has been
> renamed "adnauseam" (hey guys, with all this pathname reorganization,
> isn't it  about time to restore the original "/usr/ucb/yes" command.)

Don't forget what those historical reasons were.
People running interactive programs that prompt for yes or no answers
will often use type-ahead when the system is slow and they know what
the next question is going to be.  Any mistake in this can leave a
"yes" waiting to execute, and when it does an infinite stream of "y"s,
one per line, is printed.  This is really fun on a hard-copy console
when the operator returns a few minutes later and has to replace
the box of paper that was just chewed up.

Perhaps a better change would have been to make "yes"
not work if output is to a tty?