Text File

Aucbvax.4048 fa.unix-wizards utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards Fri Sep 25 16:06:27 1981 Re: rm and shell metacharacters >From obrien@RAND-UNIX Fri Sep 25 12:31:35 1981 We have a background daemon which runs at 4am every day, and removes all files either beginning or ending with certain strings; locally, beginning with "," or ending with ".bak".

This took more thought and experiment than something this trivial has any right to. "," is a compromise: shows up clumped at the beginnings of "ls" listings, and being at the beginning of the filename, can't be chopped off because the name is already too long (the problem with ".bak", which we used to use).

One fellow had a private "rm" which capitalized AND set the high- order bit in the first character of a filename. He had his own "exp" to expunge such things later. It never caught on. (This was Bruce Borden, who designed and wrote the first crack at the MH mail system.)

----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/

This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:

1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.

2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:

The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.