I'm going out now. I may be some time.

[Rob Landley]

On Sunday 01 October 2006 6:26 pm, Riku Voipio wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 01, 2006 at 04:49:23PM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> > > Nevertheless, there are quite some
> > > standard tools which are not really maintained any more, or in a poor
> > > fashion.
> 
> > Details, please?  (I'm curious...)
> 
> Vixie Cron (no release since 93!), netcat(96) and makedev(98) atleast. 
> Many other projects are mostly hibernating, but for simple command line 
> tools it doesn't necessarily matter - what new features could 
> /bin/true be missing?

My coworker Piggy at Timesys has a story about a bug in a zero byte file.  
Apparently under NeXt, true was a 0 byte file with the executable bit set.  
When the shell tried to run that it would (after failing to exec it) run it 
as a shell script, which would do nothing and return success.  The NeXt guys 
thought they were being really clever...  Until Piggy used true in 
his /etc/profile, and it went recursive.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.