Very Computer

I learned about a bug in the alpha test version 00.01.00 of the gulam shell
the hard way. Somehow I managed to create a file called ">foo.c" when
I fooled around with redirection. The directory where this happened
contained some other C-programs, one of them called foo.c.
When you do a "ls *.c" in that folder,
gulam expands to: "ls >foo.c bar.c something.c foo.c" resulting in
a directory list in foo.c, its old contents are gone. Is this a feature
of gulam ??? I think its a bug, a filename, however strange it may be,
must not lead to a redirection. foo.c is gone forever.
BTW, I checked it with the csh on UNIX, which behaves as expected, if you say
"ls *.c" you get a list containing the files ">foo.c" and "foo.c".
foo.c is not trashed.
Is this fixed in later versions of gulam ??

Gerhard Pehland
UUCP:  ...!seismo!unido!qtecmuc!ger

   Gulam is a very nice shell, but this is obviously alpha version
and IT HAS number of bugs (or places with a weird behaviour :-)).
For example, try to copy a file to a write protected floppy.  Gulam
will happily ablige, but instead to disk it will dump the file to
your own screen.  You may even argue, that this is a "feature" for
text files, but if you are dealing with 100K binary results may be
(hm...) rather interesting.  An attempt to break the operation will
crash your computer with 2 bombs.

   I have also experienced strange crashes after 3 or 4 file transfers.
It does not matter if I was using a built-in xmodem, or some external
program.  They were triggered by something innocent, like "ls" and
ended up with two, three or four bombs (a phase of the moon, I suppose).

   Other things.  If you will swap floppies, a new one won;t be
recognized utntil you will switch to its root directory and execute
"ls" command.  "rehash" has sometimes beneficial effects, but not
allways.

   A file >foo.c was probably created by an attempt append stdout
to foo.c, by typing somthing like "ls >>foo.c".  This does not work!
At lest not the way you would think so that it would.  I also miss
an option of saving te session in a file.

   But I still like it. :-).   Does somebody kepp track of all these
things.  I am sure theat they were rediscovered 100 times.

   Michal Jaegermann
   Myrias Research Corporation
   ...ihnp4!alberta!myrias!mj

Quote:>Gulam expands it to: "ls >foo.c bar.c something.c foo.c" resulting in
>a directory list in foo.c, its old contents are gone.
>Is this fixed in later versions of Gulam ??

- Bruce
--
Bruce Holloway - Terminal Netnews *    {seismo,sun}!amdahl!drivax!holloway

                                >>> HI, KARL! <<<