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 <cbS4d.4030$d5.31527@newsb.telia.net> <2rig76F1b49udU1@uni-berlin.de>
Subject: Re: Thought I'd throw this in ;-) for the sake of conversation.
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Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 20:17:25 GMT
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Date: 2004-09-24T20:17:25+00:00
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"Nick Roberts" <nick.roberts@acm.org> wrote in message 
news:2rig76F1b49udU1@uni-berlin.de...
>>    % ls
>>    foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
>>    % rm * .o
>>    rm: .o: No such file or directory
>>    % ls
>>    %
>
> And in fact, a fellow student at my university did precisely this. I had 
> the unfortunate task of telling her that all her coursework for the last 
> two weeks was gone. Luckily she got it back (from systems daily backup), 
> but lost a day's work all the same.

I remember once wanting to copy all *.txt from the working directory to 
another location. I mistakenly entered the command

    % cp *.txt

leaving off the destination directory. This did not produce an error 
message.  You see, there were only two *.txt files at the time, so this 
command simply copied over the second one with the contents of the first 
one!

> And people still ask me, in querulous tones, why I hate Unix so much.

Well, OTOH it can also be quite powerful. The ideal OS should combine both 
power and safety.

> -- 
> Nick Roberts