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From: barnett@crdgw1.crd.ge.com (Bruce G. Barnett)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?
Keywords: GNU OS features kernel fun!
Message-ID: <539@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 31 May 89 03:48:31 GMT
References: <106326@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <4315@ficc.uu.net> <338@arc.UUCP> <459@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <9402@alice.UUCP>
Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com
Reply-To: barnett@crdgw1.crd.ge.com (Bruce G. Barnett)
Organization: GE Corp. R & D, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 41
In-reply-to: andrew@alice.UUCP (Andrew Hume)

In article <9402@alice.UUCP>, andrew@alice (Andrew Hume) writes:

>storing information is what a filesystem is for.
>if you want to use regular expressions, put the information
>in a file. don't complicate a universal mechanism like
>the file-system name space just so you can be lazy about
>selecting filenames.

I didn't complicate anything. I just used Unix in a convenient manner for me.
If you consider that lazy, you have a warped idea of what computers are
supposed to do. I also resent your implication that I am lazy.
In fact, it took several interations until I came up with a naming convention
that was most convenient for my application.

As an example, I was collecting accounting information across several machines.
The filenames were something like
	<machine><report>-<option>.<time_period>
where
	<machine> was a hostname or ""
	<report> was some accounting type program
	<option> was a list of zero or more options
	<time_period> was a value like "Apr_28", "Apr_28.Week", "Apr_28.AM"


Now if I wanted to look at all "sa" reports for all machines for
all mornings in April, I can type

	more *sa-*Apr*.AM

If I want to print out all weekly summaries for machine mymachine,
I can type
	print mymachine*WEEK

Of course there are dozens of ways to make this more efficient
from an operating system viewpoint. My main goal was to provide
the needed functionality as quickly as possible, and long filenames
make my life a lot easier.

--
Bruce G. Barnett	<barnett@crdgw1.ge.com>  a.k.a. <barnett@[192.35.44.4]>
			uunet!crdgw1.ge.com!barnett barnett@crdgw1.UUCP