I've recently been looking into Sun's Ultra 20 line of workstations.This surprises a lot of people who hear about it, because they wonderwhy I'm thinking of moving to Solaris and a Sparc from Linux and a PC.

The answer is that I'm not. But it's an easy mistake to make, becauseSun has chosen a totally confusing product name. You see, the Ultra 20is not yet another one of Sun's Sparc-based Ultra workstations,

In the spirit of yesterday's entry on a Unix annoyance :

If you're fond of Unix, and especially if you're uncritically fond ofUnix, it's good to read the Unix-Haters Handbook (originally published in dead trees format, but now available online);another website on it is Don Hopkins' here ,which has bonus bits and pieces.

I don't agree with the Handbook; my position is probably closest toDennis Ritchie's marvelous anti-forward, which really

Unix: where you have to escape command line arguments twice, oncefrom the shell and once from the program.

I dearly love Unix, but I am forced to admit that every so often ithas what I can only describe as 'robot logic'; things that areperfectly logical, but not to normal humans. For example, consider thefun of trying to remove a file called something like " -Brad Foo ".

$ rm -Brad Foorm: invalid option -- B$ rm "-Brad