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How Do I Make This Hard to Misuse?How Do I Make This Hard to Misuse?Posted Apr 1, 2008 17:22 UTC (Tue) by vmole (guest, #111)In reply to: How Do I Make This Hard to Misuse? by jzbiciak Parent article: How Do I Make This Hard to Misuse?
My guess is that it's even simpler than that: we've got a function that puts a character to stdout, and we need one that puts to an arbitrary FILE *, so we'll add an argument. Many years ago, I worked on a Data General. The COPY and MOVE commands took, as a first argument, the destination file or directory. This made some sort of sense from an implementation point of view, but, as the TA warned at the time, "Sooner or later *all* of you are going to overwrite a source file." I think we all did.
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How Do I Make This Hard to Misuse? Posted Apr 7, 2008 7:49 UTC (Mon) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link] Kind of how the ln command in unix works, then? I've always found this massively unintuitive.
How Do I Make This Hard to Misuse? Posted Apr 7, 2008 14:38 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] So do I, but I think that's because of overexposure to C, where that sort of thing is helpfully always the other way around. If you think about it, ln(1) is perfectly consistent with cp(1): it creates or updates (for directories) the last thing you list.
How Do I Make This Hard to Misuse? Posted Apr 7, 2008 17:17 UTC (Mon) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link] It's consistent, kinda. The problem comes when describing: "cp foo bar" translates as "copy _foo_ to _bar_" okay, but the obvious translation of "ln foo bar" to "link _foo_ to _bar_" doesn't; the latter seems to say _bar_ is the original, at least to my taste. You have to process it as "create a link to _foo_ named _bar_". Or just memorize it. :-)
How Do I Make This Hard to Misuse? Posted Apr 8, 2008 8:24 UTC (Tue) by IkeTo (subscriber, #2122) [Link] > but the obvious translation of "ln foo bar" to "link _foo_ to _bar_" doesn't I see this problem as an inaccuracy of the translation "link _foo_ to _bar_". This seems to imply that both _foo_ and _bar_ are pre-existing, and somehow a "link" is created between them as a result of running the command. Obviously not what is done by "ln". It is instead to "build a link to _foo_ called _bar_". The cp is to "make a copy of _foo_ called _bar_". Pretty consistent to me.
How Do I Make This Hard to Misuse? Posted Apr 8, 2008 12:13 UTC (Tue) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] Although, since the final argument can be a directory, perhaps the best connector for both is "at": Make a copy of foo _at_ bar Make a link to foo _at_ bar Or in the plural case: Make copies of foo, bar, baz, quux _at_ dest Make links to foo, bar, baz, quux _at_ dest
How Do I Make This Hard to Misuse? Posted Apr 9, 2008 3:06 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link] Also keep in mind that the target for ln is optional. Thus:
ln -s foo/bar . ln -s foo/bar ...are equivalent. Sadly, cp foo/bar doesn't quite work. Greg
How Do I Make This Hard to Misuse? Posted Apr 9, 2008 3:33 UTC (Wed) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] That aspect of 'cp' always drove me nuts, probably because I learned MS-DOS first. I've found myself tempted to write a wrapper around 'cp' to make that form work. I won't, though, only because I know it'll wreak havoc when I go to use someone else's account for whatever reason. (e.g. to show them how to do something.)
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