Re:The roots of an obscure Bourne shell error message
by da39a3ee on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @11:37AM
(#37482875)
[delayed]
Re:The roots of an obscure Bourne shell error message
by da39a3ee on Thursday September 14, 2023 @08:15AM
(#37507894)
Actually, my use of "literally" is correct as hibbelig points out. I never said that they used the string literal "107". They literally tried to do something which would clearly lead to attempting to use a string representation of an integer as an executable name.
Well, no. That string was not literally used there at all: if it was, there would have been a literal 107 in the user's input. There wasn't.
> It’s impossible to be a good software engineer in 2023 without understanding the basics of shell programming
> bash is just constructing strings of text and doing stuff with it
It's a reassuring knowledge in 2023, after 40 years of countless bugs, exploits, vulnerabilities and accidentally rm-ed important files, the paradigm of "just constructing strings of text and (blindly) doing stuff with it" is still ubiquitously used and one can not be a good software engineer without extensive knowledge of it. Bash truly deserves description of "a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums" much more than APL.