I was introduced to Unix back in the early 80s when I studied for my Masters in CS. All the CS course homework was done on a VAX 11/780 running Berkeley Unix. At the time I was already a systems programmer on the University's DEC10 and VAX/VMS systems. Under VMS you could be confident that if a utility that your script called failed, you would get a clear an unambigous error message about exactly which program died and why it died. In contrast my first introduction to Unix error handling was when I made a change to my.login which caused the error message
Where are you?
Every time I logged in. I went to the local Unix sysadmin. He never saw that one before. How did he find out where it was coming from? He grepped the entire system looking for that literal string!!
After years of working on VMS, I moved to working on Linux. Even after years of building scripts on this platform I will ever once in a while be surprised at how some utility will die or fail in some interesting way that I was unable to catch or detect. In VMS this simply does not happen. But with Linux I find myself doing things like examining output files to verify that the stink'n utility I just executed really did do what it was suppose to do, rather than just failing silently.
The sad thing is that we're moving off of VMS but really don't want to. (VMS of course runs on Alpha hardware too.) Looking at the possible replacement operating systems we could use, none of them have the kind of clustering features we taken for granted for so long. It's like having to take a step backwards. *sigh*
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I was introduced to Unix back in the early 80s when I studied for my Masters in CS. All the CS course homework was done on a VAX 11/780 running Berkeley Unix. At the time I was already a systems programmer on the University's DEC10 and VAX/VMS systems. Under VMS you could be confident that if a utility that your script called failed, you would get a clear an unambigous error message about exactly which program died and why it died. In contrast my first introduction to Unix error handling was when I made a change to my .login which caused the error message
Where are you?
Every time I logged in. I went to the local Unix sysadmin. He never saw that one before. How did he find out where it was coming from? He grepped the entire system looking for that literal string!!
After years of working on VMS, I moved to working on Linux. Even after years of building scripts on this platform I will ever once in a while be surprised at how some utility will die or fail in some interesting way that I was unable to catch or detect. In VMS this simply does not happen. But with Linux I find myself doing things like examining output files to verify that the stink'n utility I just executed really did do what it was suppose to do, rather than just failing silently.
The sad thing is that we're moving off of VMS but really don't want to. (VMS of course runs on Alpha hardware too.) Looking at the possible replacement operating systems we could use, none of them have the kind of clustering features we taken for granted for so long. It's like having to take a step backwards. *sigh*