Hello, in the recent weeks I'm being trolled by a certain user that downvotes anything I publish (question/answer). This user usually posts ill comments (though knows when not to post them). The user is much experienced than I am in the mechanics of this site and knows how to bypass the serial-voting mechanism well enough. What should I do?

@user9303970 you should ask the moderators to step in

one way to do so is to flag the comments in question, with an explanation (basically, what you wrote above)

or ping the mods here

I don't know if even the mods can see who voted what, and as a user there is no way of knowing if one's questions or answers are being systematically voted on by a particular user.

@Kusalananda indeed, but I thought the “ill comments” might be worth investigating anyway

Thank you two,

@Kusalananda I think I would just ignore him

He's just being difficult about your error message for seemingly no reason. Anyone that uses your code can change it to their liking

@Jesse_b Agreed. I don't see why anyone would bother to discuss an error message.

@FaheemMitha Well, if the error message was truly confusing, I'd be happy to discuss it, but in this case it's the discussion that is confusing :-)

@Kusalananda I didn't really try to follow his point (if there was one), honestly.

So how are you guys doing this weekend?

I think his point is just that you used 7z archive. 7z can extract .zip files too and one could argue they are zip archives and not 7z archives. However I know exactly what your error message means so I would never argue that

maybe, if you really want to appease him, just drop the 7z and say "File is not a proper archive"

One could just go with "7z failed to extract archive".

Yea that's good too, again I think this is trivial because your error message definitely got the point across for me anyway

@FaheemMitha My weekend has just started >.>. How have you been though? I feel like you have been around chat less the last week or so

I went with 7z failed to process the file.

@Jesse_b Dunno. Possibly. I've forgotten all the Unix I knew, so I feel a bit handicapped.

@Kusalananda Sounds good.

@FaheemMitha I never knew much linux in the first place but that doesn't stop me :-P

@Jesse_b I also never knew any shell scripting, so I've less to fall back on than some of you. :-)

Did you see that 1st edition unix dockerfile I shared

@Jesse_b No.

I was playing with it the other day and I don't know enough about it to do anything...there is no cd command lol

@Jesse_b Was it maybe called chdir at that point?

@Jesse_b Is that like an early Unix in a virtual machine?

1st edition was pretty early. Was that the original Thompson Unix?

@FaheemMitha sort of, I honestly don't really understand docker but it ran in my terminal as sort of an emulator

@FaheemMitha Thompson shell, if anything. Not Thompson Unix.

@Kusalananda Oh?

Bell Labs Unix, Thompson shell.

@Kusalananda I mean the Unix Thompson wrote.

Though he didn't write it in C, as I recall.

No, first edition was still assembly. C wasn't even a thing until 1973.

@FaheemMitha Yea according to the guy hosting the dockerfile it wasn't written in c until 4th edition

@Kusalananda Ok.

but a working c compiler was supposedly available in the second edition

So presumably PDP assembler. Doesn't sound very portable.

@FaheemMitha Well, it's not much code, so porting it would not be too hard for the people in the know, and they did port it.

no chdir command. Also no pipelines

and no backspace lol, have to ctrl+h to go back one

@Kusalananda Port it to C?

@FaheemMitha Well, that's what they did. "Rewrite" may be a better description though.

Hmmm... man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/cedir

The manual is called "cedir" but its text says "chdir"

oh it does work...it's not in /bin though so it must be a builtin?

I bet people back then typed much slower than we do now

Well, I remember a discussion about when cd stopped working because it wasn't a built in, but I can't remember what the features were that they introduced to stop it from working. It may have been pipes, and/or processes running independently of each other, or maybe the whole concept of inherited environments.

It's hard to imagine a Unix without the concept of inherited environments. But evidently this was a thing up until some point.

@Jesse_b I still remember working over crappy modem connections and upgrading my modem to a whopping 9600 bit/s. Typing was still happening at the same speed as today, but you just have to wait to see what happened and not type ahead too far.

@Kusalananda I find I type much slower without the option for backspace

Hi all I was wondering if someone could answer a quick question for me, when I run “ls -la” on particular directory all the files have a number at the start of their listing,. I.e “4 -rw-r--r--”, what does that number mean? In this example the number 4.

@TheJulyPlot Don't you mean -rw-r--r-- 4 instead of 4 -rw-r--r--?

Anyway, it's the number of hardlinks to that file/directory.

$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 terdon terdon 0 Mar  4 15:33 file
$ ln file linkToFile
$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 2 terdon terdon 0 Mar  4 15:33 file
-rw-r--r-- 2 terdon terdon 0 Mar  4 15:33 linkToFile

Note how it went from 1 to 2 when I created the hardink.

Code golf anyone? unix.stackexchange.com/questions/428085/scoring-dna-script-file