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From: chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng,comp.unix.xenix,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Request for human interface design anecdotes
Message-ID: <9332@mimsy.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 13-Nov-87 02:49:23 EST
Article-I.D.: mimsy.9332
Posted: Fri Nov 13 02:49:23 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Nov-87 06:41:16 EST
References: <1721@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM> <1621@megatest.UUCP>
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742
Lines: 20
Xref: mnetor comp.cog-eng:284 comp.unix.xenix:1135 comp.unix.wizards:5446

In article <1621@megatest.UUCP> djones@megatest.UUCP (Dave Jones) writes:
>... One day I quickly typed "rm *.BAK", or so I thought.  To
>my horror, I looked at the command line and saw, "% rm *>BAK". ...
>The system was industriously deleting all my files and piping the
>(empty) listing to a new file called BAK.

Which, by the way, was also removed by rm.  The shells (csh, sh;
I have not tried ksh) perform `<' and `>' redirection before `*'
expansion.

	% cat * > together

will often fill up a file system, since `*' might expand to `ch1
ch2 ch3 ch4 index together'.  cat eventually starts copying from
the beginning of `together', appending to its end, which provides
more text for cat to read, which writes more, which provides more,
which . . . .
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7690)
Domain:	chris@mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris