[vox] fish?

Gregory Young gyoung at outland.cc
Fri Dec 31 15:52:44 PST 2004


On 30 Dec 2004, at 23:09, Robert G. Scofield wrote:

> The strangest thing just happened.  I was reading a book on Sun OS 
> trying to
> figure out how to modify my .bashrc to permanently alias rm to rm -i.  
> So I
> was playing around by typing "touch fish" and "rm fish", etc.  After 
> awhile I
> became tired and mistakenly typed just "fish."  All of a sudden the 
> rules of
> the children's card game "Fish" came up on the screen.  And to make 
> matters
> even more weird the computer started playing a game of Fish with me.
>

Interestingly, OS behaviour differs on precedence of -i and -f.  AIX 
for example, -f does not override a -i whereas on GNU implementations 
of rm, -f overrides -i.  This has led me to give more credence to not 
aliasing rm or cp or mv to their -i equivalents since the order of 
precedence is not standardised.

Be warned when working across multiple Unix and -like variants.

Regards,
Greg



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