kurt@tc.fluke.COM (Kurt Guntheroth) (09/22/88)
An engineering undergrad I knew was doing some Fortran program for her intro to engineering computing class on a Prime. (Sorry, I can't remember partic- ulars of the OS she was using.) She was just cleaning up and commenting a program due in a couple of hours. Well, to make a long story short, it seem that in the editor she was using, "del" meant delete-a-line, but "delete" meant delete-a-file. Her program disappeared and she panicked. She tried to get out of the editor. Of course it politely asked her "really save file", but it always does this when you've modified the file, so she said "yes". Needless to say, backups were unavailable to lowly undergrads. She had to type the thing in from an old buggy listing and re-debug it. Pretty neat human engineering, huh?
sullivan@vsi.UUCP (Michael T Sullivan) (09/24/88)
In article <5269@fluke.COM>, kurt@tc.fluke.COM (Kurt Guntheroth) writes: > [writes about deleting a file in the editor and then saving it] Sounds like what happened to me. In my CS10 class at UCSB we got to use Unix but had to use ed. It was the last program of the class, a pascal program that duplicated pxref, as I recall. The program was getting pretty big and I had been up a long time with it (this was before they had to impose terminal access time limits). Well it just took forever to load up with ed and one time I hit ^C before it finished because I wanted to do something else. It interrupted and I naturally did the vi-equivalent of a :wq. Since the file was only loaded up halfway I lost the bottom-half of my program. I was more than a little panicky, but I too had an old, buggy copy to go from and I was able to just get it in on time. Just one of the freshman things. -- Michael Sullivan {uunet|attmail}!vsi!sullivan V-Systems, Inc. Santa Ana, CA sullivan@vsi.com whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump