Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re:Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he ... by MayeulC on Monday November 18, 2024 @09:34AM (#42172584)

Likewise. Quite a few people here not realizing this is likely (t)csh-specific.

I ran a quick test on multiple tcsh versions I had installed, the oldest being 6.13 (2004, RedHat 4). All returned 'Unknown user: *.'

It wouldn't surprise me if at some point this expanded to every user's home directory, the way '~username' expands to /home/username, or wherever that user's home is.

I couldn't find anything of note in https://github.com/tcsh-org/tcsh/blob/master/Fixes

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Re:Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he ... by einr on Monday November 18, 2024 @09:44AM (#42172700)

I couldn't say for sure that some UNIX shell somewhere at some point did not do home directory wildcard expansion -- seems like a WMD grade foot gun, but OK -- but as you've noticed, tcsh does not do it and in fact even if you go back to csh in NeXTStep from 1989 it doesn't do it either.

Try it yourself: https://infinitemac.org/1989/NeXTStep%201.0

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