Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!mailrus!uflorida!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: fixing rm * (was: Worm/Passwords)
Message-ID: <9137@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 11 Dec 88 05:12:24 GMT
References: <1812@ndsuvax.UUCP> <717@quintus.UUCP> <6518@csli.STANFORD.EDU> <6550@csli.STANFORD.EDU> <145@minya.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 29

In article <145@minya.UUCP> jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
>The real solution is:  People who can't handle commands like rm shouldn't
>have /bin in their search path.  Even better, vendors should supply them
>with tools like mice and menus, and not bother holding the hands of those
>users that like simple, direct, powerful tools.

Exactly right!  There are different classes of "users"; what is "friendly"
for one may be downright hostile for another.  The UNIX shell user
interface was designed by good programmers for use by good programmers.
Although others can use it, they should be aware that it requires more
thought and study than a Macintosh-like interface.  Let's not ruin the
programmer interface in a (necessarily futile) attempt to make it "nice"
for people who need their hands held.

Along these lines, does anybody know what on earth has possessed the
IEEE 1003.2 working group?  They seem to be redesigning the standard
utilities, in almost every case making them worse instead of better.
They even had to debate whether "ar" should be usable with non-object
module files!  (The latest minutes show that the -r option has been
removed from "ar"; I sure hope that's not true!)  Somehow I missed
getting into the ballotting group for 1003.2, but I sure hope that
there are enough proponents of clean design to keep the current mess
from becoming a standard that will adversely affect the systems we
have to use in the future.

I still think that the minimal subset of program/script-useful
utilities and subset options I extracted from the SVID early in 1003.2's
history would be much better for standardization than a large, messy
set of features.