In message <20000608124346.A5837@noc.untraceable.net>, Andrew Brown writes:
>>| So, yes, a normal csh-type alias would work under some situations, but
>>| not all...  OTOH, if I'm the only one that uses this sort of thing then
>>| just groping __progname will be good enough.
>>
>>Checking __progname is extremely poor style.
>
>huh?  loads of programs do it all the time...well...argv[0] at least,
>but that's where __progname comes from anyway.  loads...perhaps
>they're all just special cases?

I think they are all special cases, yes.
>
>sendmail/mailq/hoststat/...
>chown/chgrp
>ex/vi/view
>cksum/md5/sum
>hexdump/od
>quotaon/quotaoff
>chfn/chpass/chsh
>passwd/yppasswd
>less/more/page
>...
>ramdiskbin/cp/ln/mv/sh/init/...

I think most of the above are in fact Bad Ideas(tm), but
ramdiskbin is a special case.

>>Users should be able to copy binaries around
>>and rename them as they see fit without seeing
>>strange lossage or behavior changes.
>
>    % touch me
>    % ls -l me
>    -rw-r--r--  1 andrew  staff  0 Jun  8 12:36 me
>    % cp /usr/sbin/chown ./foo
>    % cp /usr/sbin/chown ./bar
>    % ./foo 0 me
>    foo: me: Operation not permitted
>    % ./bar 0 me
>    % ls -al me
>    -rw-r--r--  1 andrew  wheel  0 Jun  8 12:36 me
>
>???

That's truly special. pr it?

>>While it's acceptable to grandfather in this sort of thing
>>because it has been there forever, adding new instances of it
>>should be forbidden.
>
>while it's acceptable to do cool things, you should cease from doing
>new cool things.

I don't think that parsing __progname is a "cool thing,"
it's a "hokey broken thing that causes problem." Any new cool
things can be acheived by either using command line switches or
installing seperate binaries.

--jhawk