[PLUG] Who's right.. student or system?

[A Braunsdorf]

In message <Pine.SOL.4.21.0010191403350.23341-100000@herald.cc.purdue.edu>, Bri
an Poole writes:
>
> > 1.Someone with uid: IMAENG has some files to move arround.  Using
> > finger...his home directory is discovered to be /home/lookout/a/IMAENG  I
> > won't bother re-creating the directory sturcture because I did not get
> > points taken off for improper directory names.  I did, however, loose point
> s
> > for the following:
> 
> Well ~uid wouldn't work as UID is the user's ID number, like ~100

I'd flag >them< for this one.  It's an important distinction.
Nothing worse than punks misusing terms and then picking nits.

> but
> ~user would work fine. ~user references evaluate properly on every *nix
> system I've personally worked on. I imagine this would also be allowed as
> a correct answer.

It's shell dependent (sh is the main place it doesn't work, but
I've seen people try and fail in programs other than shells, like
in C code) as another poster said.  It's a cshism (so, yeah, it's
a BSDism).  If you're moving arbitrary stuff around, you ought to
use tar anyway.  Links and stuff, you know?

As for discounting sh as another person suggested: I'd rather not.
Personally, I install recent bash and tcsh everywhere and encourage
people to use them so it's the same thing everywhere.  (You never
know what crusty version of csh or (k)sh a vendor will give you.)
But most system scripts are written in sh for good reason: it is
>the< shell.  You should know what works and doesn't in it even if
you don't have to use it much.

ab