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  From: David Lloyd <lloy0076@rebel.net.au>
  To  : David Newall <davidn@rebel.net.au>
  Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 13:46:54 +0930

Re: Bash and Vi Mode

David!

> Damn it!  Why do so many people insist on making their machines do
> unwanted work?  That command: cat /etc/inputrc | grep emacs: it's
> far too complicated.  Either be really silly, and use the command:

Why have a machine, running a command line with 256Mb of memory and a
650Mhz Athlon not work for a living?

>   cat /etc/inputrc | cat | cat | cat | cat | cat | cat | cat | grep emacs

> or use the "proper" command:
>   grep emacs /etc/inputrc

"Proper". What's so proper about that? I'm sure if you looked in the
bash man pages that what I wrote was quite legitimate. There is More
Than One Way To Do It - TMTOWTDI - and I chose the long road.

[ I remember a song with similar words ]

> That was an unexpected rant.

Unexpected? I could be uncharitable and comment that stating that the
proper way to find out whether emacs exists as a string in /etc/inputrc
is to (quote) grep emacs /etc/inputrc (unquote) is utter bollocks. I
could have opened it with vi and used the / command, opened it in emacs
and used its search features, or for that matter copied it to my windows
drive, rebooted, opened it up with Word and searched for emacs.

Given that my ultimate goal was to find out whether that string existed
in the file, all of these methods would have provided the same result.
That is to say, yes it does. And it's on a line that contains
"$if=emacs". 

Hence, _I_ pronounce both our ways proper in a non exclusive manner..

> What I meant to say was: doesn't the
> line you quoted suggest a test, not a set?

What I wanted to say is that I have no idea except that it's suddenly
worked.

DSL

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