Here's a little script I was working on back in the college lab last month. I was facing a very trivial solaris administration problem. I've installed SXDE 1/08 on 120 systems in one of our biggest computer labs long back (more on how I did that later). Now I needed a way to do certain tasks on each of those systems like changing the boot order, changing the solaris GRUB splash image, setting the hostname for each system based on its current IP address...,more.
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
Comments