NON-SOURCE POSTINGS CONSIDERED HARMFUL!

[Tom Christiansen]

Nearly half of the posting in this group have been of a non-source
nature.  Please people: don't do that.  This is a sources group.  Only
post sources.  If you want to discuss them, post to alt.sources.d
instead.   Always use a followup-to line for those too stupid to do the
right thing (we seem to have a lot of those lately.)

I was strongly tempted to cancel all the non-source postings I just waded
through.  Fortunately, I resisted.  :-) Instead I sent each author (whom I
could respond to, that is) a short one-liner comically pointing out the
impropriety of their posting.  

There's a reason this group works well and why it's not moderated.
Please don't defeat those reasons.  Is it time for a CFD to make
it comp.sources.open?

And just so I am not zapped for not practicing what I preach, here's
a little script that points out executables in your path whose names
occur more than once, you know, like /bin/mail and /usr/ucb/mail.

--tom

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
#
# pathclash -- find name classes
# Tom Christiansen <tchrist at convex.com>

$seen{'.'} = 1;

for $dir (split(/:/, $ENV{'PATH'})) {
    if ($seen{$dir}++) {
	print STDERR "skipping duplicate directory $dir\n" unless $dir eq '.';
	next;
    } 
    #print STDERR "$dir\n";
    if (!(chdir($dir) && opendir(DIR, '.'))) {
	warn "can't chdir to and opendir $dir: $!\n";
	next;
    } 
    for (readdir(DIR)) {
	next if $_ eq '..';
	next unless -x && -f _;

	($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size,
	   $atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks) = stat(_);

	if ($files{$_, $dev, $ino}++) {
	    #print STDERR "devino alias $_ in $dir\n";
	    next;
	}
	$bin{$_} .= ' ' . $dir;
    } 
} 

for (keys %bin) {
    next unless ($bin{$_} =~ tr/ / /) > 1;
    print $_, ":", $bin{$_}, "\n";
} 

--
"Hey, did you hear Stallman has replaced /vmunix with /vmunix.el?  Now
 he can finally have the whole O/S built-in to his editor like he
 always wanted!" --me (Tom Christiansen <tchrist at convex.com>)