Linda, et al -- ...and then L A Walsh said... % % On 2021/03/23 05:57, David T-G wrote: % >Again, I disagree. This is probably a religious^Wphilosophical % >difference, but IMHO it is better to fail upon a failure, even if that % >means that your login is interrupted and you have to fix it, than to % >quietly mask the failure. The trivial % ---- % Uh...If you can't login and you are logging in remotely, you % are saying it is better for you to have to abort your vacation % in ....wherever... I think that might be defined as % self-masochism. No, I wouldn't say that at all. I would become root -- which I would in advance make darned sure didn't have any stupid errors that would blow up a shell -- and go and fix the stupid user's problem. And I wouldn't be the one on call while I'm on vacation, either :-) More to the point, I have not yet seen an error which would actually cause a login to fail and leave me not at a shell prompt. I would be very interested in seeing an example of that; that would be new to me. Not getting my standard config and my favorite aliases and my cute prompt and anything else set in run commands files, yeah; that's old news. But "can't login"? Haven't seen it yet. Of course, the user stupid enough to do this to himself[1] is probably also too dumb to fix it, so it will result in a support ticket anyway, BUT the occasional clever one who was smart enough to start poking around in the first place might get himself up and going again. % % Always better for system to come up usable and send off an % email to root if it is that serious (assuming root is forwarded to % you). [snip] I'm going to take the liberty of snipping the rest because I agree wholeheartedly with a belt-and-suspenders approach of catching errors and not doing stupid things and blah blah blah :-) [1] Yes, womyn can stupid themselves, too; I'm being general but with proper plurality :-) HAND :-D -- David T-G See http://justpickone.org/davidtg/email/ See http://justpickone.org/davidtg/tofu.txt