On Mon, 10 May 2004 22:33:29 EDT, Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu> said: > I think you're agreeing with me. I can't make it a simple red circle > or green square. I have to spit out the credits _and_ the > circle/square. No, what's happening is that the mkfs program is spitting out the credits, which are being read by a Perl/tktcl/python/whatever script which is then parsing it and deciding whether to show the user a circle or a square. The concept that the user would actually see the program output during system bootup died when the Bell Lab guys first put 'foo > /dev/null' into a /etc/rc script back in the late 60s. For that matter, it probably died in late 1963, when Fred Brooks was steering the IBM team that produced (among other things) JCL, and the team thought that coding: //GO.SYSPRINT DD DUMMY was something reasonable to support (that's the JCL equiv of "> /dev/null"). I pondered the whole "credits" question for a bit last night, and I realized that (a) I could account for at least the last 75 'mkfs' commands I had caused to run, and (b) of those 75, exactly *one* did *not* have all of its output swallowed by 'anaconda' during a RedHat or Fedora install.....
Attachment:
pgpdQBjAmToQy.pgp
Description: PGP signature