Subject: Re: Anecdote time
To: Peter Seebach <seebs@plethora.net>
From: Greywolf <greywolf@starwolf.com>
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 04/30/2001 11:55:03
User: Greywolf (BSDwolf on IRC since "Greywolf" is pretty heavily used)
Preferred OS: NetBSD
Reasons:
* Stability
* Portability (nothing else runs reliably on a SPARCstation,
which is what I started with).
* The user community is, by and large, both knowledgable AND
friendly.
Anecdote:
Recently had the ... um ... "privilege" of running AOSOS
automounter. It decided to wedge, so I killed it and started
unmounting things manually. I decided to rmdir all the empty
directories, and when it hit a particular user's home directory,
it refused to rmdir. The error it returned? "No such file or
directory."
# cd aforementioned_dir
# cd ..
# rmdir aforementioned_dir
aforementioned_dir: No such file or directory.
# rm -fr aforementioned_dir
[pause. Hit ^C in a panic after realising what's happening.]
Now, pardon me, but if you do a rmdir, shouldn't you get ENOTEMPTY
or (in case it's a mount point) EBUSY (assuming it's empty), and
not ENOENT? Principle of least surprise? Anyone?
I still haven't fully recovered my home directory, and AOSOS
amd does random hangs when I update the amd.home maps. Feh.
--*greywolf;
--
*BSD: Stable and strong!