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From: neal@weitek.UUCP (Neal Bedard)
Newsgroups: net.jokes.d
Subject: Better ways of saving rotated jokes
Message-ID: <193@weitek.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 23-May-85 21:17:14 EDT
Article-I.D.: weitek.193
Posted: Thu May 23 21:17:14 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 27-May-85 00:06:58 EDT
Organization: Weitek Corp. Sunnyvale Ca.
Lines: 35
Keywords: Why not fix `readnews' ? (a plea for software robustness)

Recently I posted an article on saving rotated jokes unrotated. Here is
a summary of responses:

From Cameron C. Carson, Distributed Systems Group Boston University ACC:
> [...] here's a much less painful method:
> 
> (23 lines) More? [ynq] D13 | cat > joke
> 		         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> this will save an un-rotted article in file 'joke'.
> 

From: ...!bbnccv!keesan (Morris M. Keesan)
> tr abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ \
> 	nopqrstuvwxyzabcefghijklmNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLM
> 
> will rotate/unrotate any "rot13" joke (or other file).  To save a 
> rotated joke unrotated, simply save it in a file, then run the above command
> with the rotated file as standard input and another file as standard output.
> I have this particular command in a shell script called $HOME/bin/unrot.

(phasers on stun)

I appreciate the responses. However, this underscores a common problem with
UNIX utilities, in that they often depend upon using the power of the Shell to
fix holes in software.

I posted the article as a challenge to would-be hackers to fix `readnews'
so that it is symmetrical to `postnews' in its treatment of articles in
net.jokes. Responses of "Of course, you can pipe it thru frobnitz into foo..."
while useful, encourages laziness by software writers, since they can depend
upon this facility to cover their tail. Worse yet, they tend not to document
such workarounds. Not everyone has time to hack....


-Neal B.