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Unix Nightmare

Posted by Frank Wimberly-2 on Oct 21, 2016; 11:49pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Unix-Nightmare-tp7587974.html

I first learned Unix when I went to work at Bell Labs in 1978.  I was only there for two years but over the next 18 years at Carnegie Mellon I used Unix workstations or time-sharing systems almost constantly. The other night I had a dream that involved Unix.  I am not saying the dream made sense.  Dreams often don't.  For some reason I had a feeling that someone had modified my system by replacing the cat command with a shell script that didn't behave the way cat should.  I decided to use the which command to find where the fake cat script was located in the file system.  But then I thought how can I examine the script without using cat.  I was going around in circles about this until I sort of woke up.  I realized that I could use ed to look at the script.  Then I went back to sleep.  Sometimes my memories of my dreams aren't accurate.

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Santa Fe, NM


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