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Please include disclaimers on FRAGILE CODE
Authored by: merlyn on Jan 29, '04 01:20:25PM
Ugh.

(process && good_news) || bad_news
Please don't suggest junk like that without also giving the limitation that you must be very sure that good_news exits with a good status. Otherwise, you end up doing both good_news and bad_news.

I could wrangle the neck of the guy who first posted that to a usenet newsgroup many years ago thinking they were "clever" without thinking about how dangerous of a meme it was when not annotated with the proper caveat. Especially when other forms work even better.

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Please include disclaimers on FRAGILE CODE
Authored by: name99 on Jan 30, '04 04:42:17AM

Ah, the UNIX mindset in action.
(1) Tell the world how great the shell is because of redirection etc.
(2) Learn that there are various cases where these tools are problematic.
(3) (And this is the key one, the one that really exposes the pleasant side of the UNIX personality) --- spend the rest of your life shouting at people who actually try to use the tools you evangelized in (1) without doing a thing to either
(a) FIX the damn problems so that they cannot be made by novices or even
(b) explaining to the poor user what they did wrong, why, and how to avoid the error in future.

Truly a thing of wonder to see an individual be so clueless on the most elementary social interaction level.



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