34 Welcome, New User! Of course, though, on this occasion I mistyped as my fingers go on autopilot and prefer the word ‘indent’ to the non-word ‘ident:’ % indent foo Now, it turns out that “indent” is the name of UNIX’s brain-damaged idea of a prettyprinter for C. Did the bastard who wrote this abortion consider checking to make sure that its input was a C file (like, oh my god, checking for whether or not the name ended in “.c”)? I think you know the answer. Further, Said Bastard decided that if you give only one argument to indent then you must mean for the source code to be prettyprinted in place, overwriting the old contents of the file. But not to worry, SB knew you might be worried about the damage this might do, so SB made sure to save a copy of your old contents in foo.BAK. Did SB simply rename foo to foo.BAK? Of course not, far better to copy all of the bits out of foo into foo.BAK, then truncate the file foo, than to write out the new, prettyprinted file.10 Bastard. You may be understanding the point of this little story by now… Now, when a Unix program is running and paging out of its execut- able file, it gets really annoyed at you if you mess about with all its little bits. In particular, it tends to crash, hard and without hope of recovery. I lost 20 hours of my program’s state changes. Naturally, the team of bastards who designed (cough) Unix weren’t interested in such complexities as a versioned file system, which also would have saved my bacon. And those bastards also couldn’t imagine locking any file you're currently paging out of, right? So many bastards to choose from why not kill ’em all? Pavel Imagine if there was an exterior paint that emitted chlorine gas as it dried. No problem using it outside, according to the directions, but use it to paint your bedroom and you might wind up dead. How long do you think such a paint would last on the market? Certainly not 20 years. 10Doubtlessly, the programmer who wrote indent chose this behavior because he wanted the output file to have the same name, he already had it open, and there was originally no rename system call.

Error Messages and Error Checking, NOT! 35 Error Jokes Do you laugh when the waiter drops a tray full of dishes? Unix weenies do. They’re the first ones to laugh at hapless users, trying to figure out an error message that doesn’t have anything to do with what they just typed. People have published some of Unix’s more ludicrous errors messages as jokes. The following Unix puns were distributed on the Usenet, without an attributed author. They work with the C shell. % rm meese-ethics rm: meese-ethics nonexistent % ar m God ar: God does not exist % "How would you rate Dan Quayle's incompetence? Unmatched ". % ^How did the sex change^ operation go? Modifier failed. % If I had a ( for every $ the Congress spent, what would I have? Too many ('s. % make love Make: Don't know how to make love. Stop. % sleep with me bad character % got a light? No match. % man: why did you get a divorce? man:: Too many arguments. % ^What is saccharine? Bad substitute. % %blow %blow: No such job. These attempts at humor work with the Bourne shell: $ PATH=pretending! /usr/ucb/which sense