From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailbox.osf.org ([130.105.1.8]) by hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu with SMTP id <2749>; Mon, 22 Feb 1993 10:38:04 -0500 Received: from earth.osf.org by mailbox.osf.org (5.64+/OSF 1.0) id AA04404; Mon, 22 Feb 93 10:37:58 -0500 Received: by earth.osf.org (5.65/4.7) id AA11536; Mon, 22 Feb 93 10:37:57 -0500 Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1993 10:37:57 -0500 From: rsalz@osf.org Message-Id: <9302221537.AA11536@earth.osf.org> To: rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu Subject: Why featureful shells can be bad Here's a fun story. The machine rodan.uu.net is the central server for internal stuff at UUNET; it's where staff gets their email, has their homedirs, etc. Well for some reason there was a file /usr/spool/mqueue/=sendmail file, but no /usr/lib/sendmail. Someone cp'd the latter, and tried to remove the former rm =sendmail Well, in zsh "=foo" means "expand to the full path of the exectuable of foo. Zap, away went /usr/lib/sendmail AGAIN and nobody at uunet got email for an hour or two. Two iterations of this. /r$