@Adam, it was just a word to describe what I was talking about. @Radp In plain English, your sentence translates to "If I don't like [something], I can do that."
If you want a technical reason, then remember that UNIX dates from the period when 1meg was a lot of memory, and 1 gigabyte hard disks were an insane pipe dream
a giant monolithic program wouldn't even load let alone run
Just some concrete examples instead of "design philosophy" and the one I hate (for any question), the rhetorical, explanation-void "Why shouldn't you?"
Sorry, I didn't quit mean "design philosophy" didn't mean anything, its just that the alternative is getting dismissed without consideration for when it would be useful (keeping all the critical functions in one place and being able to load them into memory).
But then A) They'd no longer be separately updatable B) They'd no longer have separate filesystem entries and associated permissions C) They'd have a shared address space, so a vulnrability in one could have knock on effects in others D) You can add new programs "at will", as you invent them E) The working space of bash would be huge if you had every commonly used unix utility as a built in F) You don't need to worry that launching "touch" will spin up a new 70 meg process
What did you think, that the command prompt had the source code for handing deletions in FAT32, NTFS etc. and that Windows Explorer had them in a separate place or something?
@radp I'm not advocating one over the other, but if the size is small, replacing the bundle shouldn't be a problem, and (my blood sugar is dropping, where is my train of thought)
There are lots of little questions that need balancing, though, like "Why would you want to update your rm in the first place?" (and, nitpick, if you're going to do that kind of thing, you're going to be writing your own code, which Adam just talked about)
No, I wasn't trying to stir up anything, but it's hard to be satisfied when you are assuming I know something I don't or the reason has some hidden assumption
Please allow us to vote to timeout a room if the discussion starts degenerating or otherwise going off-topic. Unfortunately this is a mods only feature and mods aren't always around.
I think six votes in five minutes should be enough.
@Radp I'm not sure what you mean. (continued from above) That's not at all what I meant, and there are numerous horror stories about the utilities and frozen systems, so I wanted to find out the specific reasons, that's all.
@Adam That's not a fair analogy, and that's the kind of misinterpretation I've been fighting the whole time.
That's not true. You guys ignored me until the third time I asked, and I was asking because (as Popular already explained) he thought I was joking, and your answer was unclear to me.
@Adam The reason I asked was because there were many stories about locking/moving/deleting the little files that actually let you move, copy, and so on. I wasn't sure where the problem was, so I asked for some reasons. Tim noted that the problem is usually running as root when you shouldn't, though.
So it started to seem like a Unix-user-spite-fest instead of helping a non-expert to understand the reasons it went that way.
And I'm sorry, I guess I was a little reactive myslef.
@YiJiang, @MichaelMrozek, new rule! Make sure you edit the readme file if you're changing something that affects command syntax. Like say, adding a parameter to /transcript, or adding a /profile command...
@radp correct. i'm not sure if there is one in the chat, though the minification seems to change the function names. you could look through the code or ask @balpha
var user;
$.each(document.getElementById("active-user").classList, function(class){
var candidates = class.match(/[0-9]+/);
if(candidates.length)
user = toInt(candidates[0]);
});