jab@Okc-Unix@sri-unix (09/01/82)
From: Jeff Bowles <jab@Okc-Unix> Date: 27 Aug 1982 10:21:37 EST (Friday) In response to the question about what to do about not having the history mechanism left intact over a "su" or "newgrp" (or, for that matter, any "sh" boundary): If I were a process, I don't think that I would like somebody changing my state (whether it was by patching "/dev/mem" [uggggg!] or by executing some "force" system call to poke what the user wanted into the proc stucture) without telling me. At the very least, I'd like to know whether to change the user's prompt. Or were I a small DBM, perhaps I'd want to change what uid was recorded with each transaction. Why not just create a mechanism to communicate the history and the like? Cracking eggs with bricks isn't a good habit to get into. Jeff