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Red Hat Nullifies Differences Between Bash, Csh

Andreas(R) writes "Red Hat Software has revealed that future versions of the distribution will hide the differences between command-line user interfaces, creating a 'more unified shell prompt experience'. 'I don't mind if they rebrand and unify the GNOME and KDE interfaces,' said one Linux longhair. 'Frankly, I rarely use GUIs. But when they start messing with my CLI, then it's personal. I'm not going to sit here and let Red Hat infect my beloved tcsh with those annoying quirks from bash." Ah, nothing like satire that only a small group will truly grok. *grin*

17 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. it is a joke! by u19925 · · Score: 2, Informative

    though I wish this was really true, but unfortunately, it is just a joke.

  2. Hmm by Hamster+Of+Death · · Score: 2, Informative

    First thing I read in the article:

    Fake News written by James Baughn on September 25, 2002
    from the let-the-flame-wars-continue! dept.

    I think the -Fake News- part might reveal some insight on the credibility of the story!

  3. Re:Slashdot editor question by SnAzBaZ · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you hadn't noticed it's under the "funny/humour" catogory. Turn this catagory off in your preferences if you dont want it.

  4. Re:huh by HTMLSpinnr · · Score: 2, Informative

    What's funnier is that some people here haven't quite gotten the fact that it IS a joke.

    Come on people, read the article...

    /me sits back patiently and watches the crowd reaction as they flame Red Hat, bitch about their beloved csh or bash, or just kick Coyboy Neal in the nuts for posting such useless drivel. :-)

    --
    $ man woman *
    -bash: /usr/bin/man: Argument list too long
  5. Re:FAKE NEWS by ripewithdecay · · Score: 3, Informative

    They have this in their FAQ, too...

    This stuff is fake, right?

    Yes, the "news" articles published here at Humorix are, ahem, all made up. Fake, fake, fake. Don't take anything we say seriously (except for this sentence, of course).

    A few people have actually written in and asked if an article was true or not. While we are flattered that our fabrications were mistaken for actual news, the fact remains: everything here is fake. A few nuggets of truth might be found, but everything else is a figment of our imaginations. If in doubt, just remember this saying: "Fake news is to Humorix as unconfirmed rumors are to Slashdot."

  6. Re:What's funnier? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    The article itself, or the fact that it seems like the majority of posters have failed to:

    A) RTFA
    B) Notice that this is "from the funny-funny-haha dept."
    C) Read the editors comment Hemos left in the little blurb once again clueing them into the fact that the article is a joke just like the ignorant fools who have started to bitch already.


    D) That the story is filed under the Humor icon.

  7. Re:bash? csh? i give my users... by Trusty+Penfold · · Score: 2, Informative

    The default behaviour for unix is to check for failure. Hence false returns !false to indicate that it failed to fail. true returns false to indicate that it did failed to succeed.

  8. Re:At least the size would be reduced... by iabervon · · Score: 2, Informative

    Size of emacs: 4763354
    Size of libqt-mt: 10796068
    Size of libc.a: 24187284

    A statically compiled emacs may be pretty big, but it's also 98% libc. Emacs has had a reputation for being really big for ten years, but it's really only big for ten years ago.

    (file sizes are from my local builds)

  9. Re:bash? csh? i give my users... by psamuels · · Score: 4, Informative
    I always thought the standard for false was zero and true was non-zero. Is if different for those two?

    As p3d0 said, shells behave the opposite. (Although there once was an odd bug in - what was it, Ultrix? - where csh behaved the opposite, i.e. didn't behave the opposite, i.e. was buggy, with regards to the && and || short-circuit operators. But then, csh history is replete with odd bugs.)

    But to expand on the point: in Unix, the exit status of a program is an integer (7 unsigned bits, anyway: trying to use more is not portable). Convention dictates that 0 is normal termination, non-zero is abnormal, and anything over 128 means it was killed by a signal rather than the exit() function. (Which signal? Subtract 128 to find out.) Furthermore, many programs document their various abnormal exit status numbers to mean various failure cases.

    Note that even MS-DOS (and all of its misshapen get) uses the zero / greater-than-zero convention. In DOS, a process's return value is called the "errorlevel", which indeed more accurately describes its main purpose.

    This convention also goes a little deeper in Unix. Most system calls and many C library functions (remember, the standard C library was first defined on Unix) return 0 for success (or similar concepts: "equality" in the string compare function strcmp()) and non-zero for failure ("inequality" in strcmp()). Even system calls which return other meaningful integers (open(), for example) generally use >=0 for success and -1 for failure.

    So it may make no sense from a boolean logic point of view but zero==true is surprisingly widespread. Mostly because there is often only one way to succeed at a task but many ways to fail, and it's useful to be able to report specific failure modes.

    --
    "How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
  10. Re:Question by jonnythan · · Score: 4, Informative
    Since you didn't read the FAQ like I said, here it is from Mr Slashdot himself:

    Personally, I have a pet peeve when people post comments saying things like "That's not News For Nerds!" and "That's not Stuff that Matters!" Slashdot has been running for almost 5 years, and over that time, I have always been the final decision maker on what ends up on the homepage. It turns out that a lot of people agree with me: Linux, Legos, Penguins, Sci (both real and fiction). If you've been reading Slashdot, you know what the subjects commonly are, but we might deviate occasionally. It's just more fun that way. Variety Is The Spice Of Life and all that, right? We've been running Slashdot for a long time, and if we occasionally want to post something that someone doesn't think is right for Slashdot, well, we're the ones who get to make the call. It's the mix of stories that makes Slashdot the fun place that it is.


    The home page is whatever Malda wants to make it. Slashdot started as Rob Malda's pet project, and that's basically what it will always be. It's an obscenely popular project and makes some money (maybe) now, but it's still his personal project.

    Deal with it. No one, especially Rob, cares what you think "should" be on the main page.
  11. Re:Vi versus Emacs... by kasperd · · Score: 3, Informative

    Vi is a word in several languages.

    Yes, as an example "vi" happens to be the danish word for "we".

    --

    Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
  12. Re:bash? csh? i give my users... by Cryptnotic · · Score: 3, Informative

    It won't work. /dev/random isn't usually marked as executable. Even if it were, it wouldn't even get to run anything unless by some miracle the random string was a valid ELF header. Of course, the random string could also be something like "#!/bin/bash", thereby giving them a shell.

    What you want to do is make a script like:

    #!/bin/sh
    cat /dev/random

    Then make that script their shell. When they log in, they'll just get lots of random crap.

    --
    My other first post is car post.
  13. Re:Oh Gawd, More Holy Wars... by kootch · · Score: 3, Informative

    Best text editor: BBedit

    "It doesn't suck"

  14. Re:bash? csh? i give my users... by gotih · · Score: 3, Informative

    if you have ever taken ANY C class you will remember that line at the end of your function 'return 0;' that meant 'everything's fine'

    --

    fear is the mind killer
  15. Re:At least the size would be reduced... by Z4rd0Z · · Score: 3, Informative

    Christ almighty, what the hell do they put in libc to make it 24 megs? On my FreeBSD system, libc.a is 1568K, and there is talk on the mailing list of finding ways to trim it down.

    --
    You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
  16. Re:At least the size would be reduced... by holle2 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Just for completeness:

    libc.a propably contains symbols and debugging info. If you compare libc.a and libc.so you'll see the difference:

    $ ls -l /lib/libc.so.6 /usr/lib/libc.a
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1343073 Mai 11 2001 /lib/libc.so.6*
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 24539184 Mai 11 2001 /usr/lib/libc.a
    or in more human readable format:
    $ ls -lh /lib/libc.so.6 /usr/lib/libc.a
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.3M Mai 11 2001 /lib/libc.so.6*
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 23M Mai 11 2001 /usr/lib/libc.a

    With /lib/libc.so.6 only being linked to:
    $ ldd /lib/libc.so.6
    /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)

    And stripping symbols yields this:
    $ ls -lh libc.a
    -rw-r--r-- 1 holle users 23M Nov 5 08:34 libc.a
    $ strip libc.a
    $ ls -lh libc.a
    -rw-r--r-- 1 holle users 1.6M Nov 5 08:34 libc.a
    Voilá
  17. background for this joke by IndependentVik · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm sure this would be modded much higher if everyone knew the full story.

    --
    I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.