henry (08/25/82)
I am currently considering one change that has been suggested several times in the past: making the explicit "login" command go away. This would make it impossible to sign on under a new name except by signing off first. One could still acquire another name's permissions temporarily using "su name". The motive for the change is that ill-informed people persist in using login as if it were su -- invoking it from inside the editor and suchlike. This does not work right and cannot be made to work right; the basic definition of "signing on" simply does not allow having more than one login at a time on a single terminal. It is a bug that the system permits this to happen. Unfortunately, it is pretty much impossible to fix this without outlawing the legitimate practice of typing "login joe" to simultaneously sign off and sign back on again as joe. If I find a way around this, I'll do it. On the assumption that I can't, does anybody have strong opinions about being unable to type "login joe"?