[ILUG] repair permissions

[Niall O Broin]

On 17 Mar 2005, at 20:03, Brian Foster wrote:

>   | The only answer to this is Neal Stephenson's classic essay about 
> the
>   | Hole Hawg, which you can read at http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html 
> .
>   | The 6th paragraph sums the matter up nicely IMO.
>
>  ( I hope I have trimmed down my original e-mail to the part Niall
>   is commenting on — Niall quoted almost all of it, including
>   paragraphs which clearly do not apply to the referenced essay. )

All the paragraphs I quoted were, as I read them, in one way or another 
complaining about some aspect of Unix.

>   • “use a professional power tool incorrectly and you can get hurt.”
>       agreed.
>       so, what _is_ the power tool here?  `chmod -R'?  or `find'?

In the case in point, chmod -R was clearly the incorrectly used 
dangerous tool.

>  my answer is the classic paper by Rob Pike and Brian W Kernighan,
>  “Cat -V Considered Harmful”, http://netlib.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/doc/
>  its conclusion:
>
>    “[ Unix ] is successful in part because it has a small number
>     of good ideas that work well together.  Merely adding features
>     does not make it easier for users to do things — it just makes
>     the manual thicker.  The right solution in the right place is
>     always more effective than haphazard hacking.”

Of similar quality to most of these gentlmen's published writings, I 
don't think it's particularly relevant here.

>  in case it is not clear, I maintain `chmod -R' is a badly designed
>  tool, arguably produced by “haphazard hacking”, and `find' is the
>  power tool.

It was clear enough. I happen to disagree. Would you also remove the -r 
option from rm & chown ? (My particular bugbear with recursive use of 
chmod/chown is that they use -R instead of -r as used by rm)


Niall