Re: Unix Nightmare

Posted by gepr on Oct 22, 2016; 6:34pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Unix-Nightmare-tp7587974p7587986.html


What makes this nightmarish (to me) is the broken contract between you and "cat", or larger between you and your OS.  Such broken contracts are a part of all my nightmares.  And the admittedly more pleasant aspects of the nightmare are the ways you try to restore your operational power inside the dream.  It's the same old fear of spies, moles, talking behind one's back, etc.  If you can't trust your closest relationships, you're truly lost.

But awake, it's relatively easy to admit that I don't understand "cat" any more than I understand pond scum or dogs.  So, those contracts are delusions and the more one thinks they know their intimate relations, the more delusional they are.  (Note that "delusional" isn't pejorative.  Innovation is driven by delusion.)

On 10/21/2016 04:49 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> 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.


--
␦glen?

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