Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!rpi!pawl.rpi.edu!deven From: deven@pawl.rpi.edu (Deven Corzine) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: arp CD command change??? Message-ID: Date: 14 Feb 89 10:59:24 GMT References: <8902131846.AA21527@postgres.Berkeley.EDU> <35960@bbn.COM> Sender: usenet@rpi.edu Organization: RPI Public Access Workstation Lab, Troy, NY Lines: 57 In-reply-to: cosell@bbn.com's message of 13 Feb 89 22:56:28 GMT I still find some definite problems with the AmigaDOS method of file system structuring. I find "." and ".." far easier to use effectively, even if they are more to type. "" as current directory is obnoxious, if you ask me. There is no easy equivilent for "./file" under AmigaDOS... "file" isn't the same thing; maybe you want to force use of the file in the current directory, and not search any sort of a path. (Path searching should never be done on pathnames, only on basenames...) You can't use '""/file' or '"/file"' or '/file' because they all refer to the file in the parent directory. I suppose "current directory/file" would probably work, but that's a rather horrible kludge itself, and far far more inconvenient to type than ./file is. (You CAN, for example do 'list "current directory"' to get a listing of the current directory. weirdness.) Hence, I'd much rather have . and .., with / as root. A viable option is to provide both filenaming conventions, selectable by configuring an environment variable. (preferably not global) I don't understand at all the objection to Unix wildcards. Both the Bourne shell and C-Shell support somewhat more complex wildcards than the simple ? and * characters. Certainly on par with AmigaDOS's wildcards. In addition, the wildcards are expanded in the shell, and can therefore be used consistently, not just where the programmer decided to let you use wildcards. I strongly agree with the need for symlinks and hard links in AmigaDOS. Hard links, at least. As a point of note, Unix does NOT make a symbolic link to the parent directory under "..". By no means. ".." is a HARD link to the parent directory, and "." is a HARD link to the current directory. As such, "." is literally a subdirectory, though it is self-referential. And, um, excuse me, but if you think Unix wildcards are so limited that they can only handle "*.o" and "*.a" and not "*.REL" or "*.LIB" then you are a complete bozo. First off, Unix conventionally uses lower case, and the entire philosophy behind Unix supports effeciency and keeping things short and simple. (Granted, SysV and BSD 4.3, et al. are somewhat larger than they perhaps ought to be. But the idea remains.) This applies in part to filenames, mostly to save typing and to be consistent. Just because object files in Unix are normally such as "file.o" doesn't mean you couldn't use "file.obj" as well; it's just more to type, while .o is quite enough of a suffix to make it clear what type of file it is. A .obj extension might be handy for a neophyte who is unfamiliar with Unix, but merely hampers experienced users unnecessarily. Unix is harder to learn than many operating systems because of its terseness, but many people find they like it much better once they get used to it. I certainly do. Next time, please get your facts straight before flaming as fine an operating system as Unix is. Or hold your flames. Deven -- ------- shadow@pawl.rpi.edu ------- Deven Thomas Corzine --------------------- Cogito shadow@acm.rpi.edu 2346 15th Street Pi-Rho America ergo userfxb6@rpitsmts.bitnet Troy, NY 12180-2306 (518) 272-5847 sum... In the immortal words of Socrates: "I drank what?" ...I think.