From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Jul 11 19:07:09 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id TAA00591 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Sat, 11 Jul 1998 19:07:09 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from smtp01.primenet.com (root@smtp01.primenet.com [206.165.6.131]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA00569 for ; Sat, 11 Jul 1998 19:07:05 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tlambert@usr08.primenet.com) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp01.primenet.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id SAA19201; Sat, 11 Jul 1998 18:23:35 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr08.primenet.com(206.165.6.208) via SMTP by smtp01.primenet.com, id smtpd019159; Sat Jul 11 18:23:25 1998 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr08.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA17458; Sat, 11 Jul 1998 18:23:19 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199807120123.SAA17458@usr08.primenet.com> Subject: Re: Improvemnet of ln(1). To: bakul@torrentnet.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1998 01:23:19 +0000 (GMT) Cc: joelh@gnu.org, dchapes@ddm.on.ca, rminnich@Sarnoff.COM, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <199807111759.NAA20011@chai.torrentnet.com> from "Bakul Shah" at Jul 11, 98 01:59:35 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > How on earth will issuing a diagnostic make it harder to write > > scripts? > > Because now you have to filter out (additional) noise. Consider the "improvement" to the dump(8) command about a year ago... > > I'm *not* talking about a prompt a la cp -i. I'm *not* talking about > > a failure a la trying to symlink over an existing file. I'm talking > > about a diagnostic. > > Understood. I am just pointing out that *any* deviation from > existing practice can break things. Especially if it is a deviation in order to protect the kind of people who type "DIR" in DOS after "DELETE FILE.DAT" to reassure themselves that the system, indeed, did what they told it to do, and deleted the file. Protecting people who don't believe a file is really gone until they get a directory listing without the file in it is pretty low on the ladder of UNIX priorities. I wouldn't object too strongly to a "-w", as has been suggested elsewhere, so long as the alias was not there by default. I would still object a little, on the principle that a future version of POSIX might define a "-w" argument, causing a namespace collision with the FreeBSD version of the command (and thus breaking scripts, .login's, .cshrc's, etc.). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message