[ale] One for systemd haters

[Lightner, Jeffrey]

If that was the intent it might have backfired.   As I noted I typically delete files with unusual characters in the name.   Luckily I knew to check on whether this was “intended” before I did so but I wonder if others would delete it to solve their grep problem without thinking of ramifications.

No matter why they did it I suggest this was a boneheaded name to use and whoever thought it up should be cussed out by his own great grandmother.

Funny about the spoon.   Once when we were teens and far taller than our mother my brother made the mistake of asking her what she was “babbling about”.   She immediately hit him with the hard cover book she was reading at the time and exclaimed that she doesn’t babble.   The look on his face was priceless.


From: Jim Kinney [mailto:jim.kinney at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2018 10:39 AM
To: Lightner, Jeffrey; Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] One for systemd haters

Another way to look at this is those files are so absolutely critical to the operation that naming in a way that defies ordinary users from easily finding them helps protect their content. I would further suggest that as those files have been renamed and apparently made an automatic inclusion/embedded in the start-up of systemd that was the intent all along but the method was not finished at the systemd release in CentOS7/RHEL7. I see the -.mount and -.slice in Fedora 28 as having been loaded/run/achieved but those are NOT explicitly named as such anywhere in the /usr/lib/systemd/system structure.

My dad once said a cuss word around his mom. She reversed the bowl of a large cooking spoon on his head.

On Wed, 2018-10-10 at 14:18 +0000, Lightner, Jeffrey via Ale wrote:

"valid" and "reasonable" are two different things in my view.



You may have "valid" reasons to cuss out your great grandmother but almost no one else hearing you do so will consider it "reasonable".



While it is true shell expansion can cause unexpected behaviors, creating a file with such a name is completely unreasonable even if allowed.    There are many characters one might put in a file name that most of us know not to do because of their special meanings.    Usually when one finds such a bizarre filename it is because of some typo or other action that added weird characters - not intent.   Typically if I find such files I verify they're not in use and delete them.  I couldn't do that in this case as it was clearly intended to exist.



"your [developers] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."



-----Original Message-----

From: Solomon Peachy [mailto:pizza at shaftnet.org<mailto:pizza at shaftnet.org>]

Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2018 2:36 PM

To: Lightner, Jeffrey; Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts

Subject: Re: [ale] One for systemd haters



On Tue, Oct 09, 2018 at 06:23:29PM +0000, Lightner, Jeffrey via Ale wrote:

As an FYI the “-“ at start of file name doesn’t just affect

grep/egrep.  Any command that tries to look at * in a directory will

have the issue because it expands that “-“ as if it were an additional

flag to the command issued rather than just the start of a file name.



The thing is, leading '-' is perfectly legal for a POSIX filename.

Which is why getopt and other bog-standard cmdline parsing libraries implement the special '--' option to signify that subsequent arguments are filenames rather than options.



This quirk of shell wildcard expansion/ambiguity isn't anything new, especially to anyone who has had to work with real-world-supplied filenames.



 - Solomon

--

Solomon Peachy                            pizza at shaftnet dot org

Coconut Creek, FL                          ^^ (email/xmpp) ^^

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

_______________________________________________

Ale mailing list

Ale at ale.org<mailto:Ale at ale.org>

https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale

See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at

http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo



--

James P. Kinney III



Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you

gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his

own tail. It won't fatten the dog.

- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain



http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20181010/3ca20743/attachment.html>