Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the people who've commented on my lastentry have attributed this behavior to people'sdesire to get their issues dealt with promptly (to some, this is jumpingthe queue; what you could call a 'vigorous discussion' has broken outin the comments about this, rather to my surprise). I have a couple ofreactions to this view.

First, I am pretty sure that this is not why people here do it, at leastfor the kind of cases that I

Let's start with a Bourne shell irritation. Suppose you have a commandsequence that looks like:

may-fail | grep ...

Further suppose that you want to know whether may-fail actuallyfailed. In the normal Bourne shell, you're out of luck; the exit statusof a pipeline is the exit status of the last command, and grep willprobably succeed no matter what happens to may-fail . You're goingto need to use a temporary file instead of the pipeline or

Like many places, we have several generic aliases that users mail aboutvarious issues. And, just like I expect happens everywhere, every sooften users don't use those aliases and instead email some specificperson here with their issue.

I recently came up with a theory for why this happens: it's easier toremember people (and then their email address) than it is to remembersomething impersonal. So people remember 'oh, I dealt with last timeto fix this', and