Unix shell design [was Re: Yes, Unix can do batch renames - Re: Unix handles file extensions "very poorly"?]

No, it doesn't necessarily make it so. But they do correlate remarkably well, at least in my experience. Hm, yes, I overstated the case. "The other is that novice-friendly usually means logically inconsistent special cases." The problem is not what the interface looks like, or should look like. The problem is implementing it. As it stands, the only entity that can tell whether I typed "rm *" instead of "rm Makefile a.c a.o b.c b.o etc" (or whatever) is the shell, so this requires a very ugly special case in the shell. That's why I was trying to design a general mechanism that supports the desired effect without resorting to a special case - in this case, knowing that the command spelled "rm" should have magic treatment for a * on its command line (worse, it only sometimes should, if it supports your -y suggestion). Something like my idea would permit moving the code into rm, which is where it belongs; that way, the test is kept with the program, so it's performed only when it should be. Perhaps _you_ like them. I remember when they came in and I really wished I could turn them off entirely. If I'm typing to a lisp listener, I want everything I type to be taken as Lisp code, never (mis)interpreted as some kind of funky non-Lispy CLI. But there's little reason to do a point-by-point reply to your example; it's all a question of who finds what intrusive, helpful, whatever. Indeed. Even if you never use it for anything else, even if you find it stunningly inconvenient, it is valuable as one of the very few examples of a (live today) system that is severely non-POSIX. It also gives some ideas for alternatives to things that people used to traditional systems never even question, like, "do we need filesystems?". And getting your head around Lisp, whether on a Lisp Machine or not, is something I can't see as bad in any case. I think there is a little truth lurking in it, though. While it doesn't have to take the form of a bad experience with rm, I think that learning that Unix is an extremely YAFIYGI system is very important, even to the point where it might be fair to call it a rite of passage. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B