17 Dec
2011
17 Dec
'11
3:20 p.m.
On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 11:21:39AM -0800, Josh Dersch wrote:
On 12/17/2011 10:48 AM, Kevin Schoedel wrote:
Just write a safe and cuddly shell for novices and call it the i-shell.
The users might associate it with ipad, iphone and other ... "userfriendly"
devices and the experts can quietly snicker at alternative interpretations
of the name.
Unfortunately, the trademark landsharks of a certain fruity company would
probably scuttle such a name ...
SCNR,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
At 10:32 am -0800 2011/12/17, Josh Dersch wrote:
Well, that and the fact that getting "rm" (or del) to behave the way
I suggest actually requires low-level changes to the shell's
wildcard expansion (*and* thus would require a change to all all
tools) mean it'll never work.
I'm aware of this. I started out suggesting things I'd fix in a
perfect world -- my hypothesis was "it's possible to make a
user-friendly CLI that helps both novices and experts" and I used
the earlier-bandied-about "rm *" issue as one thing that could be
improved upon. I don't think Unix can realistically be fixed in
this regard -- as you've stated (and I also stated in an earlier
mail) the backwards compatibility problems are insurmountable. (quick question -- how often in a given week do
you run "rm *" ? How
much longer would it take you to append "-y" to those invocations?)
How
much longer would it take to 'fix' all the scripts that use rm, and how
much longer would it take to clean up after the damage caused by the bugs
introduced? Unix commands are part of a programming system; standalone
interactive use is a minority use case. If you want a new command, write a
new command. You can even call it "del".