On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, Richard Earnshaw wrote:

> > If you don't agree that a single point of failure makes things less safe
> > I'm sure NASA would be interested in hearing about your deductive
> > skills. :-)
> 
> What makes you think that having lots of separate programs, each of which 
> does different things and cannot represent the functionality of another 
> isn't a single point of failure?

Let me see...
echo *

Hmmm, sure looks like that could be somewhat equivalent to ls...

cat foo > bar

Heck, that works almost the same as cp!

mv foo bar

Well, foo didn't disappear, but there is no foo anymore.

cat > foo

A usable substitute for an editor if what I'm creating is very small and
in text.

cp foo bar; rm foo

That looked almost like a mv.

ftp myothermachine:/foo/bar

mount myothermachine:/foo /mnt
cp /mnt/bar .

Hey, they seem to result in the same thing. Imagine that.

I can probably go on for a while longer, but I *hope* you get the point
this time. I have been forced to do things this way sometimes, when things
turned bad (on a few occasions, cp on NetBSD/vax have been known to stop
working because some mmap problem).

> As has been pointed out.  If you are worried about things like that. Then 
> install several /rescue directories.  Better still, do that on several 
> different disks, and arrange your system so that you can boot from any of 
> them in an emergency.

That is also an option. But /rescue is rather vulnerable, plus I probably
don't even know if it works until the day I'm going to use it.

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol