[PLUG] where does Red Hat start x?

Jeme A Brelin jeme at brelin.net
Tue Dec 30 15:34:01 UTC 2003


On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> `touch ./-rf`
>
> Now remove it. Depending upon the `rm` you may very well accidentally
> remove everything. Don't alias rm, as mentioned by others, use it
> carefully.

Yeah, some smart-alek bad-programmer wannabe fellow at a job I had tried
to befuddle us by putting files called "*" in all of his directories
thinking we'd be daft enough to blow everything away while cleaning up
cruft.

Fact was, we wanted to blow it all away anyway because everything he did
had to be rewritten anyway.

He was one of those guys who purposely writes spaghetti code with
worthless variable names as an attempt at job security.  Needless to say,
it didn't work... probably backfired, in fact.

Unfortunately, it still works most places... in fact, every contract I get
has at least one permanent guy who works an hour a month or something, but
can't be fired because he's the only one that has ever managed some dumb
system.  Usually said dumb system can be replaced with a perl script.
Oddly enough, it's these kind of practical solutions that make me an
undesirable contractor.  See, IT directors get VERY worried when you start
talking about decreasing their staff.  If you point out incompetence,
you're asking them to tell their boss that incompetence was going on under
their nose.  They don't like that.

Pardon the Robinsonian rant.

J.
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     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
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