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From: muth@amdahl.UUCP (John A. Muth)
Newsgroups: net.jokes
Subject: Computer Science Bloopers
Message-ID: <1989@amdahl.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Sep-85 13:01:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: amdahl.1989
Posted: Thu Sep  5 13:01:15 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Sep-85 06:09:24 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: Amdahl Corp, Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 32

<>

This is a true story.

There was a novice UNIX user that had a directory that looked like:

file_to_edit.c other_stuff.c...

Having just read the sh documentaion, he typed in:

% vi *.c

Lo and behold, vi came up with the file he wanted to edit. "This is
great", he thought. He made the changes to the file and gave vi the
commands:

:w *.c
:q!

thinking this would update his file. When he got the shell prompt
back he did an ls and found:

*.c file_to_edit.c other_stuff.c

At this point he was confused. He decided to start from scratch
and re-edit his file. But first he wanted to get rid of this strange
file that had appeared in his directory. So he typed in:

% rm *.c

-- 
John A. Muth           ...!{ihnp4,hplabs,sun,nsc}!amdahl!muth