xterm rules [LWN.net]

xterm rules

Posted Feb 3, 2006 17:29 UTC (Fri) by tjw.org (guest, #20716)
In reply to: xterm rules by eru
Parent article: Openbox: A lightweight window manager (Linux.com)

I could probably count on one hand the number of days in the past decade that I have NOT used xterm. It terms of PID's it has to be the binary i've run the most in my life. That's all well and good, but what is truly mind bogglingly amazing is that this is probably the ONLY piece of software that I have used regularly that has NEVER segfaulted on me.

/me knocks on his desk

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xterm rules

Posted Feb 3, 2006 19:26 UTC (Fri) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

I suspect you may have run /bin/sh slightly more often... ;-)

xterm rules

Posted Feb 3, 2006 20:22 UTC (Fri) by tjw.org (guest, #20716) [Link]

Nope. I used to use tcsh, but switched to zsh a few years ago :)

Unless you're counting processes that the system runs, then I would have to concede that I run init more than anything else.

xterm rules

Posted Feb 3, 2006 21:29 UTC (Fri) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

Ah, yes, the numbers are a little different when $SHELL != /bin/sh. When $SHELL = /bin/sh, we can assume that all those little scripts that glue a Unix system together contribute to the front-runner's score, rather than a competitor's.

According to sa, my most popular executable at the moment is '")', closely followed by 'B)'. Is there some patch to acct that makes it work with 2.6 kernels, or am I missing something?

xterm rules

Posted Feb 3, 2006 20:20 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It's even more amazing if you look at the code. Good grief but it's awful, despite Thomas Dickey's valiant attempts to clean it up.

(That's another reason I use konsole: it's a from-scratch reimplementation with all that horrible xterm grot ditched. xterm may as well be closed source because nobody human can understand it ;) )