There's a lot of argument in general about what is (merely) a 'scriptinglanguage' and what is a fully fledged programming language, deservingto hold its head up high besides grown up languages like C, Java, andPascal.

Unix is a simpler place, because it has a simple and very cleardefinition of what is a script versus what is a program. To wit: if thekernel can directly exec() you in place as is, you are a program. Ifnot, you

I've recently been writing some small programs to digest multilinerecords which don't have an end of record marker, just a start of recordone (in my case, the output of Solaris iostat ). People who've writtenawk probably know the natural structure that results from dealing withthis purely line at a time; you wind up with a situation where youaccumulate information over the course of the record, and then use the'start of new record' line to print out everything, reset counters

Every so often, people do silly things in the name of anti-spamwork. While we can curse the creators of stupid polices like 'sendnotification email to the envelope origin address of mail scored asspam' as idiots, people aren't really, and I think it is more fruitfulto consider why such policies get created.

(There is a university subdomain in Texas that does this. Really.When we started getting these notices, I almost wrote them a verygrumpy letter asking what sort of idiots

A commentator here recently noted the danger ofthe Unix pattern of stat()'ing a filename, checking to see if the statresults look good, and then open()'ing the file. The problem is thatin many cases an attacker can change what the filename is pointing tobetween the time you stat() it and when you open() it, so that youcheck a harmless thing but open a dangerous thing.

In thinking about this, I came to realize that this is an example