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From: per@erix.ericsson.se (Per Hedeland)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Passing on unwanted groups
Message-ID: <1990Aug21.104851@erix.ericsson.se>
Date: 21 Aug 90 08:48:51 GMT
References: <1990Aug14.181327.16145@eci386.uucp> <101429@uunet.UU.NET> <1990Aug15.164651.26664@zoo.toronto.edu> <49281@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> <1990Aug16.163107.1166@zoo.toronto.edu>
Sender: news@eua.ericsson.se
Reply-To: per@erix.ericsson.se (Per Hedeland)
Organization: Ellemtel Telecom Systems Labs, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 23

In article <1990Aug16.163107.1166@zoo.toronto.edu>,
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
|> In article <49281@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry
Aguirre) writes:
|> >If the history file is so mangled that it is useless to recover expired
|> >IDs from then there is this marvelous and powerful tool called "rm".
|> 
|> Unfortunately, there is also a Unix tradition that "rm" isn't necessary,
|> rebuilding something overwrites the old version automatically.  I worry
|> about naive sysadmins being tripped up by a non-traditional user interface
|> in a time of stress.  Emergency tools are the last place you want to get
|> creative or minimalist about user interface.

Unfortunately, too, the mkhistory script will not properly install the
newly-built files if you have used the abovementioned tool on the old ones;
you have to use the less powerful and more complex tool "cp /dev/null >".
Of course, reading the script reveals what happened and what can be done
about it, but as long as we're talking about emergency and stress...

--Per Hedeland
per@erix.ericsson.se  or
per%erix.ericsson.se@uunet.uu.net  or
...uunet!erix.ericsson.se!per