Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!att!alberta!edm!rroot
From: rroot@edm.UUCP (Stephen Samuel)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: COmputer follies
Message-ID: <3274@edm.UUCP>
Date: 17 Sep 88 20:50:19 GMT
References: <856@viscous>
Organization: Unexsys Systems Inc., Edmonton,AB.
Lines: 46

From article <856@viscous>, by brianm@sco.COM (Brian Moffet):
> 
> Friend of mine talked to a man once who had done the following
> command on a Xenix machine:
> 
> # cat /etc/wtmp > /dev/hd00
Similarly, was something which happened to a friend of mine some years ago:
He knows much better now, and is probably on the net.. (hi, Gilles!) 
Background: on BSD4.1, the default display format for 'ls' (when printing to
a terminal) was (seemed to be) the equivalent of -F ([dir] executable*) with
unprintable chars as '?'.

Gilles, one day ended up with a file who's name was a single, unprintable
character.  When he did an 'ls', of course, this came up as 
 ?*  file1   [dir1]  file2 file3  ....

Not wanting to have this stupid file around, of course, he tried to remove it:
 `rm ?*`
 
and got a few complaints from 'rm' about trying to remove directories.
I came intothe picture when he started trying to figure where most of his
files had gone to.
  It was close enough to "the mythical RM STAR" to be rather impressive to
those who knew better.

Thankfully the system (!alberta ) had a good backup regimen.

------
 Then again, there was the SECOND YEAR student whom I had (roughly) the
following conversation over an APL terminal printout.


"What does this message mean? ('VALUE ERROR')"
"oh, that's easy: it means your variable is undefined."
"hunh?"
"You haven't assigned a value to it.. You have to have assigned a value to a
variable before you can print it out!"
student goes DOWN the listing about 3 pages.
"but I did that right here!!!"
"(guh!) You're in SECOND YEAR??!"


-- 
-------------
Stephen Samuel 	  (userzxcv@ualtamts.bitnet   or  alberta!edm!steve)
MS-DOS : CPM impersonating UNIX  **   OS/2 : IBM impersonating APPLE