Comments on: How Not to Use Shell Commands http://www.pythian.com/blogs/525/how-not-to-use-shell-commands News and views from Pythian DBAs Thu, 4 Dec 2008 21:39:56 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.5 By: SimonH http://www.pythian.com/blogs/525/how-not-to-use-shell-commands#comment-66967 SimonH Sun, 24 Jun 2007 10:16:12 +0000 http://www.pythian.com/blogs/525/how-not-to-use-shell-commands#comment-66967 A useful post - worth thinking through why the commands went wrong (might make a good opening question for a technical interview). My worst example of this was once: $ mv bigfile1 bigfile2 stage where bigfile1 and bigfile2 had taken all night to download over a 56k modem and the stage directory doesn't exist. Since then I have always put a / on the end of the directory name, though fortunately I don't think modern Unixes let you make this mistake (I've just tried Solaris10 and it says "mv: stage not found"). A useful post - worth thinking through why the commands went wrong (might make a good opening question for a technical interview).

My worst example of this was once:

$ mv bigfile1 bigfile2 stage

where bigfile1 and bigfile2 had taken all night to download over a 56k modem and the stage directory doesn’t exist. Since then I have always put a / on the end of the directory name, though fortunately I don’t think modern Unixes let you make this mistake (I’ve just tried Solaris10 and it says “mv: stage not found”).

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