Behaviour on crash of editors, Tar/Gzip, and teaching UNIX at UNI

 On Crash Handling
 -----------------

Vi always used to be good on crash behaviour. Vin is not bad:

 vi - keeps a backup file on disk. Some routine finds backup files left
 by an old vi, and emails you telling you how to restore it. Typically
 few keystrokes lost. Very useful when telnetting in over an unreliable
 link (from a windows 3.1 machine at the time, which was very unreliable
 until we put Linux on it). The email was generally waiting by the time
 the telnet link came back up.

 vim - uses a memory mapped file to edit in. Operating system responsible
 for syncing that to disk, and generally very good at it.  When you come
 to edit the file again, if it finds the .swp file it asks you what you
 want to do about it.

As an aside:

 Microsoft Word 2000 on NT. Some network failure the other day:

   "Word has lost its disk swap file for the file. It will now exit, 
    writing out what it can as it does so. You have no choice - any bits
    of document not in RAM will be garbled".

 On Tar/GZ
 ---------

As for Tar not Zipping - its separation of concerns, a common design
principle. UNIX utilities are designed to be small tools that are
very good at their job. You combine them together with pipes and
shell scripting to get the whole job done. Tar knows how to make a tape
archive. GZip knows how to compress data, or you could use BZip2, or CPIO
instead of Tar. You could pipe through GPG for encryption if you want,
send it over a network or all sorts. Traditional UNIX, everything is a
file, you take input from somewhere, pipe it through whatever and send
it somewhere else. Because everything speaks the same simple interface
(the file IO calls), you have a lot of flexibility.

This way may seem hard to a Windows user, but small components are more
reliable. Also consider the situation where you may be running (say)
a database and some other system on a box. Both need to send emails
to administrators in certain situations. Both have their own way of
setting up and doing it. On UNIX you can call an external command, use
the system mailer, whatever. Its so much more flexible, and also can
be made so much more consistant. (Also note how on UNIX, so many things
speak the same mailbox format)

 On Universities
 ---------------

As for the university that teaches Linux, Java, Oracle. I have Linux
and Java. I badly need Oracle training, and am considering Oracle/Java
certification. Thats a very solid set of skills, and will teach a lot of
basics if taught well. Big systems tend to be running UNIX/Oracle/Java
more than small shops that have kept with the supplier of their office
suites and gone Windows.

It is basics that count though, and showing Windows for comparison will
help, but Windows should not be taught alone. Especially as Windows
keeps changing.  Something taught now may be completely useless in a
few years, unless the underlying principles are taught as well.

 - Richard

-- 
   _/_/_/  _/_/_/  _/_/_/ Richard dot Corfield    at    ntlworld dot com
  _/  _/    _/    _/      Fortune Cookie: The prettiest women are almost
 _/_/      _/    _/       always the most boring, and that is why some
_/  _/  _/_/    _/_/_/    people feel there is no God.   -- Woody Allen,
                          "Without Feathers"