/dev/chat - 2018-06-20

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7:19 AM

Please review these codes that are aimed to do basically the same task (finding the main .htaccess of the site and changing it):

for dir in "$HOME"/public_html/*.{com,co.il}/; do
if pushd "$dir"; then
chmod 644 .htaccess
popd
fi
done 2>/dev/null

# find "$HOME"/public_html/*.{com,co.il} -name ".htaccess" -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Might it be that they will effect .htaccess files in subdirectories of each dir under public_html?

3 hours later…

10:42 AM

Hello Chat, I've posted what one might call an attempt to a canonical question https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/450835/53092
Your edit and remarks are very welcome

5 hours later…

3:25 PM

@user9303970 sounds like a good question!

2 hours later…

5:07 PM

O/

O\

What's up @Kusalananda?

Hi @Jesse_b.

@Jesse_b Nothing special. One working day of this week left (midsummer's eve on Friday is a public holiday), then another week until a bit of vacation.

The downside is obviously that there's a few things that needs to be finished before I go on holiday...

5:23 PM

@FaheemMitha Здравейте!

@Jesse_b Good grief.

According to Google Translate, that's Hello in... Bulgarian?

віншаванні!

@FaheemMitha :-)

@Kusalananda Oh, no. Et tu, Brute?

@Kusalananda Make some AI to do your work for you :)

5:25 PM

@Kusalananda Congratulations in Belarusian?

I didn't even know there was such a language as Belarusian.

I've been back in the office for half a day and I feel sick already

These heathens have some sort of super germs

@FaheemMitha Supposed to be "greetings!", but congratulations is good too.

@Kusalananda The perils of auto-translate.

5:41 PM

"The perils of auto-translate." From english->kannada->thai->hawaiin->english
"The translation is available"

@Jesse_b You clearly have entirely too much time on your hands.

@Kusalananda I suppose the obvious question is - congratulations for what?

@FaheemMitha I think he was intending to write "Greetings"

@Jesse_b Yes, I know. He also said "congratulations is good too".

Btw @FaheemMitha: Did you ever successfully record those gangsters and have them arrested for extortion?

@Jesse_b I'm not sure what you are talking about. But that certainly didn't happen, so the answer is no.

I'm guessing that you are talking about something I mentioned in the channel earlier.

5:44 PM

@FaheemMitha I made up my own back story for why you needed the discreet recording device

@Jesse_b Ah. Now it makes sense.

Actually, I ordered the H5 from Amazon India, twice. Both times it was defective in the same way.

Which might sound weird, but thereby hangs a tale, as they say.

@FaheemMitha I bet the mafia is on to you and they have a guy on the inside with the manufacturer sending you defective products

So the first time I ordered it and it was defective, I returned it. Shortly afterwards, I saw exactly 1 unit available for sale from the same manufacturer.

I made the obvious guess, and called up Amazon to ask if they were trying to sell the unit I returned. The rep assured me that wasn't the case. So I ordered that "new" unit, and it had exactly the defect.

probably going to keep selling it until someone doesn't care enough to return it

Some additional weirdness - I've been trying to return it for some days (since Sunday), but nobody has come to pick it up. Yet additional weirdness. I've now been notified that I've been credited for the return, even though the product has not actually been returned.

I swear, I'm not making this up.

@Jesse_b You're really good at making people feel better.

5:50 PM

make some sort of discreet mark on it before you return it

then buy it again

@Jesse_b This time I actually took a photo of the outside - there is a serial number. I should have done so in the first place.

I doubt making a mark on it is an option. It's hard plastic.

So, not without cutting it or something.

@Jesse_b That sounds like something a paranoiac would come up with.

Anyway, on the Indian scale of weirdness, this actually ranks fairly low.

@FaheemMitha Says the guy involved with the Indian mafia

@Jesse_b You jest, but I'm actually surrounded by criminals here.

Details are (sort of) available by request, but I doubt it would improve anyone's day.

@FaheemMitha I'm so intrigued lol

@Jesse_b It's kind of horrible, actually. Despite what Hollywood films would have you believe, criminals aren't glamourous. They're frightening and disgusting people.

5:55 PM

What sort of criminals and are they directly affecting you or just doing stuff you don't want to allow

At least, the Indian variety.

@Jesse_b White collar crime. It's endemic in India. Recently there was that business with the security guards. I can't remember if I mentioned that here. That's certainly directly affecting me.

What about the security guards?

@Jesse_b So you don't know what I'm talking about?

@FaheemMitha It sounds familiar but I think you were vague when you last mentioned it

@Jesse_b Ok. Well, we have security guards at the entrance to our compound. That contains the building we live in. And recently there was a secret type conspiracy thing to replace those guards with other guards from dodgy security agency we know nothing about.

There's quite a lot more to it, but that's the gist.

I'm unclear how serious this is, but it certainly isn't good.

5:58 PM

Hmm, sounds like there could be all sorts of reasons for that

Could be the mafia is using your building as a base of operations, or the building management is trying to save money with cheaper labor

@Jesse_b Agreed. But the secrecy is real. And the security agency has ignored repeated requests for the contract.

@Jesse_b Definitely not the latter. The former is sort of happening already, in a very loose sense.

Nice

It's a very bad situation. Unfortunately it's also not a new one.

There is going to be a movie about you taking on the mafia one day

@Jesse_b Very unlikely.

6:00 PM

You need to come up with a catch phrase to say when you take your sunglasses off

@Jesse_b What?

@FaheemMitha or put them on

CSI: Miami - Horatio Caine's Sunglasses Moments / One Liners

@Jesse_b To be clear, none of this is actually a joke.

Also, I don't wear sunglasses.

@FaheemMitha :-(. Do you think you are potentially in danger?

@Jesse_b Define danger.

I could end up homeless at some point. Does that count?

Granted, it's not a particularly likely possibility unless I do some fairly stupid things.

6:09 PM

I suppose, but are they specifically targeting you or just at risk that your home will no longer be available

Direct physical danger probably not. But one never knows.

@Jesse_b Hmm. That's a hard question. There are some fairly bad people in the vicinity, and they don't much like me.

Again, this really isn't a joke.

It's kind of a long story...

And a bit of a trainwreck. Though very little of it actually involves me directly.

Or even indirectly.

Actually, "a bit" is an understatement. It's basically the story of a family destroying itself.

Anyway, I'm going to call Amazon now to ask them why it takes 4 days to not do a pickup.

6:27 PM

@FaheemMitha For being alive?

@Kusalananda Oh, that. Well, thanks.

And congratulations in return to you.

6:45 PM

Man, solaris grep has no -o option

:(

@Jesse_b sed 's/.*\(PATTERN\).*/\1/g

Well, not quite the same.

that is printing the whole line for me

@Jesse_b perl -ne '/(PATTERN)/ && print $1, "\n"'

although I am trying to match literal parenthesis as well

You would have to escape any parens, just as with grep.

6:53 PM

perl works, ty sir!

Good!

Darn unix people should just accept gnu tools already :-P

ducks

@Jesse_b They have, and that's why you get questions like "why doesn't cp dir -r some/other/dir --only-on-a-wednesday work?"

was --only-on-a-wednesday ever a real switch? lol

@Jesse_b No, I made that up...

7:02 PM

I don't see what that has to do with unix people accepting gnu tools

@Jesse_b Sorry, you're not allowed to flag things here as offtopic :-)

:-P

If I told the engineers at work they should include GNU tools in the OS they would probably make me write "I will not say stupid things" 1000 times on a chalk board

What I meant was that most people asking things on U&L certainly have embraced the GNU coreutils and other GNU tools. And they expect things to work like that everywhere. But they don't, and that's good, because GNU tools have real issues with command line flags and strange reordering of command lines options.

I really dislike the "convenience" of GNU tools.

GNU cp has a --attributes-only flag!

And it does backups!

heh, I guess I have never really had much problems with them and have mostly only had problems with the lack of them

like not having access to sort -h

And GNU mv has --strip-trailing-slashes. How lazy are people?

7:11 PM

@Kusalananda meh. I don't know if I agree. If I write up an answer with one pipe more than necessary I get lampooned about it not being efficient, yet you want people invoking extra utilities to sanitize input data?

@Jesse_b You don't have to call an external utility to remove slashes on a string.

@Kusalananda What if it's not stored in a variable?

@Jesse_b How would you call mv then?

GNU has generally operated as a sort of unofficial Unix standardization for a long time.

@Kusalananda mv file1 file2

7:17 PM

That was the case back in the 90s, as I recall.

@FaheemMitha Ha! That one was funny!

@Kusalananda I wasn't meaning to be.

I guess in that case you would have to manually type the slash though lol

@Jesse_b No slashes there. See, that was easy.

@Kusalananda To be clear, I'm talking about the basic GNU utilities stuff.

7:18 PM

mv ./* ../*

@FaheemMitha I haven't seen very many GNU-isms sneak into POSIX.

@Jesse_b No trailing slashes, again.

@Kusalananda Hence "unofficial".

@FaheemMitha Hence not standard.

I suppose POSIX is sort of official.

@FaheemMitha Yeah, kinda.

7:20 PM

@Kusalananda I'd say it's verging on standard, at least.

Don't even BSD people use it, often?

@FaheemMitha It is indeed.

@Kusalananda I meant GNU, not POSIX.

The GNU tools have been around a long time. They aren't perfect, but they are apparently a lot better than the status quo that was around at the time when they arrived.

@FaheemMitha I see a steady stream of commits to the OpenBSD base repositories that correct minor things so that they are in line with POSIX.

@Kusalananda That's nice.

A few things in ed were fixed just the other week.

7:22 PM

Again, my point was that GNU was sort of a Unix standard. I wasn't suggesting that BSD people would alter their utilities to confirm with GNU. Just that BSD people probably use GNU too.

For one thing, the GNU tools generally have more features.

And back in the 80s and 90s people were quite happy to have them. I suppose these days there are other options. Like Clang.

@FaheemMitha I don't think "more features" means "better", it just means you can use a fewer number of tools to do more things. Which in turn means users don't have to care too much about what works on non-GNU systems, which means they start writing scripts that are non-portable. And then they end up here and start answering questions with "just install GNU coreutils and everything will be fine".

The other day, someone commented on an OpenBSD question with "just install Linux".

@Kusalananda I agree that "more features" does not mean "better". But it can mean more convenience.

@Kusalananda Which should be an acceptable answer :p. 2018 and not using coreutils? shame on you :)

That's why people like features, isn't it?

@Jesse_b Just precisely because coreutils is not standardized, it has to be treated as a moving target, just like bash. This works in this version, but not in that version.

It's a mess.

It's also why I like C and other real standard languages. Try doing something in Python, and you'll mess up if it's plus or minus 0.5 versions off.

7:27 PM

The thing about keeping things small is that you have to do more implementing yourself. Like everything else, it's a tradeoff.

Only if you only know the small set of tools that GNU has taught you you can do everything with.

@Kusalananda I think that's what they call "progress". :-)

@Kusalananda I don't follow.

How many have heard about and used comm and join? No, they first try with head and grep, not even awk.

Yeah but at this point I think GNU is more common than it is not

True. I can't deny that.

7:30 PM

@Kusalananda Ok. Are comm and join GNU things?

So you can write a program with head/grep that will work on like 90% of the machines out there but someone will complain because it wont work on some stubborn unix system

Back in the 1980s things looked a bit different. When gcc was the world's first free C compiler.

@FaheemMitha Also GNU things. Thay are POSIX utilities. But nobody knows about them because they do everything with grep and get their results colorized.

@Kusalananda oh

@FaheemMitha Except for pcc.

7:33 PM

@Kusalananda I don't think I recall that. Was it a full C compiler?

@FaheemMitha It has C99 support.

@Kusalananda if it was around in the 1980s, why did Stallman bother with gcc? And possibly more relevantly, why did people use gcc?

@FaheemMitha BSD license.

@Kusalananda Oh. Was that the only reason?

@FaheemMitha If I know anything about Stallman, yes.

7:36 PM

@Kusalananda Ok. <Shrug.>

just spent the last 30 minutes tracking down where a variable was being set lol

bashrc sets it to the value of another variable and I eventually found that variable is being set by some obscure file being sourced in .profile

I thought gcc took off simply because it was better than everything else available.

Which seems plausible to me, because why would developers care about a compiler's license?

I mean, people using a C compiler, to be clear.

@FaheemMitha Yeah, why do people who use C care about licensing? Why don't they all use clang?

@Kusalananda Because gcc now has an large user base of people using it. And there's always resistance to switching away from something you know.

I'm talking about back in the 80s, when gcc was first created. It was a big success quite quickly. In fact Cygnus was created to exploit the niche that it created.

At least, that's my understanding.

I don't know if younger people have heard of Cygnus. It was swallowed up by Red Hat.

Cygnus Solutions

Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide commercial support for free software. Its tagline was: Making free software affordable. For years, employees of Cygnus Solutions were the maintainers of several key GNU software products, including the GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils (which included the GNU Assembler and Linker). It was also a major contributor to the GCC project and drove the change in the project's management from having a single gatekeeper to having an independent committee. Cygnus developed BFD...

And I just came across this fragment in search - news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469218

Mildly interesting.

7:54 PM

@FaheemMitha Here's some of the reasoning for why OpenBSD switched from gcc to clang, and it doesn't all have to do with licensing: openbsd-archive.7691.n7.nabble.com/… (written well before the actual switch)

@Kusalananda Interesting read. But my point was about an earlier era. When Clang did not exist.

A free software LTS compiler is an interesting notion.

Imaginary, but interesting.

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