[H-GEN] Shell programming [was: Re: Encrypting a tar backup]

Jason Parker-Burlingham jasonp at uq.net.au
Fri Oct 25 11:21:52 EDT 2002


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Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:

>     But, if in a moment of forgetfulness, you tried to do it
>     with this:
>         $ uniq foo bar
>     you will be severely punished -- you get no output and bar
>     is suddenly over-written with the contents of foo.  Oops.

Yeow.  I hate this.

My current `favourite' are the MS Word decrypters I have installed to
deal with folks who're still stuck on legacy OSes, which, when called
as
        $ catdoc foo.doc
will happily go and create `foo.txt' for you.  Broken, broken, broken!

I don't run catdoc often, and I'm usually left worrying that there
wasn't any legible output.

(Actually I guess I'm being misled by the "cat" in the name of the
program, too---hey, we've come full circle!  Hooray!)
-- 
||----|---|------------|--|-------|------|-----------|-#---|-|--|------||
| ``It's just a big electric typewriter.''                              |
|                                                                       |
||--|--------|--------------|----|-------------|------|---------|-----|-|

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