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Please ask yourself what constructive reason there was to say such a thing. It is perfectly reasonable to expect not to have to edit your profile to make the backspace key work in the year 2008. Instead of placing the blame on the user, fix the problem. I have been a Unix admin for 20 years (next month) and have watched the damage done by arrogant, RTFM, blame the user attitudes for that entire time. As such attitudes, and associated attitudes which spring from them, held Unix back from its rightful place on the desktop as another OS achieved greater and greater market success in that area. IMO, we can no longer afford to harbor such attitudes.

I'm glad to hear that OpenSolaris will be setting 'erase' properly by default, or whatever fix they are planning.

Trifles make perfection but perfection is no trifle.

Edited 2008-05-05 19:05 UTC

Depending on who you ask, the function <backspace>, or the act of of deleting a single character to the left (previous), should be mapped the the rubout key, or <delete>.

If default Bourne shell was not mapped with "stty erase", which is an easy fix, its probably good cause behind this. There were many terminals in use so the path to least resistance was followed by allowing the user to set their own environment.

Have to agree really. When you look at OpenSolaris, and its inability to do Virtual Terminals as well, you really have to ask what you're getting. All they're doing is stuff that Linux distros fixed......years ago.

It makes Linux look as ready for the desktop as it ever was, and it's actually a decent reminder just how much has improved.

Edited 2008-05-05 20:55 UTC

The plain and simple reason of teaching users the fundamentals of using a system. Majority of the problems faced by computer systems users today would be solved with a little education.

You don't just give a kid,learning to ride for the the first time, a bike and tell him/her to go around a block for a spin, do you? You don't just hop on your bike and compete in the tour de france without training. How about when some one decides they want to drive? Similarly even if you know how to drive you just can't expect a person to drive around a race track.

If a person decides to use the shell on a Unix/linux systems they should at least know the basics of how to set shell properties.




Why? Why is it any more unreasonable than rm not moving a file to the trash can/recycle bin? The desktop environment has that as the mechanism for deleting a file why shouldn't the shell in 2008?



You are assuming it is a problem and not just a user preference.



Unix had a lot more problems than user attitudes that prevented it from making it on the desktop. Linux has had a shell that does erase on backspace for almost a decade, how much desktop market share has it gained?

Well said and I'm almost in total agreement, except on letting another OS take over the desktop ;-)

I personally find that a major issue with Unix, especially in the workstation market, was that none of them interacted very well with one another as well as the fact that they cost so much and mostly needed proprietary hardware. Sure, the BSD's where around but due to the AT&T court case, nobody wanted to touch em with a barge poll.

I must say that the amount of times I have heard users complain about the arrogant behavior of Unix admins is quite shocking.

Knowledge of Unix systems, especially shell scripting, is often worn like some kind of badge of honor and anyone not privy to the secret handshake must be some kind of dim wit. Failure to hide such dimwitedness, especially if the dimwit in question has the incredible stupidity to express a dislike, or even just ask a pertinent question, must be met with ridicule and denunciations as otherwise, how else will the admin be able to show off his incredible esoteric knowledge of Unix?

The arrogance is truly pathetic, not to mention unfounded, but unfortunately, I come across it far too often. It seems like you do too Steve.

Yeah, well, one can at least expect that a keyboard acts like it should act, that each key does what it was designed for, especially if it's one of the basic operations you kinda really need when using a command line.

But you shouldn't have to. Any organization with an ounce of attention to detail would already have done that for you.

If it would fail gracefully and not do anything that would be one thing, but it doesn't. It spits out characters.

Thanks for the info. I'll have to try that when I spin up a VM for Solaris. I do know that editing the .rc, or .cshrc, depending, file for the shell will load my preferences each time I login, but I haven't run into this problem outside of Solaris. Consequently, it's never been a priority for me to find a fix. Yes, I can read documentation and use a search engine.

Also, I couldn't implement the fix if I wanted to. I don't admin boxes, the standard for root is default, and there are 500+ boxes where I work. I don't want to change the shell when I'm work on recovering a crashed box. I'm not sure what will break, and I don't want to introduce variables.

There are perfectly good reasons I haven't found a solution to the problem, and none of them are related to me not knowing to the .rc file or my Linux usage.



I've never claimed to be a Unix expert, anywhere. I'm just happy Solaris will have an updated root shell, and I won't have to deal with that silliness if I decide to run it as my main OS.

I've used Unix, and Linux, Fedora, is the first Unix or Unix-like OS with the features to enable me to stick with it for a long period of time. I have to be able to get done what I need to get done. Which is the nice thing about Linux, it's Unix-like without making too many comfort sacrifices.

I use Linux to learn the fundamentals of Unix and Unix-like OSes. I threw threw myself into the deep end, so I couldn't retreat to a familiar OS. (I still have many OSes around, OS X, FreeBSD, Vista, XP, but I use Linux as my primary) Granted all the learning isn't one for one, but I learn the concepts.

That's because the character is not mapped by the shell. It is not failing, per se. Just behaving differently.



You can exec bash at the prompt or tcsh or whatever shell you want.



That's beside the point.



If you are root on a box or 500+ at my company and called basic stuff like stty, silliness. I would be very worried.



That's fine and totally understandable. But just because something is not what you are used doesn't mean it is broken. That was my point.




Ah I remember the good old days when I was in college and made the same statement (running linux as my main Os and having others around to play with). :-) That's not a bad way to go about learning keep at it and all the best.

I must admit I was a little harsh and the discussion spun out of control.

It's certainly a different day and age today. :-) I've seen so much:

\E[23~
\[7m
\E[!p\E[?3;4l\E[4l\E>

in my time. Fixed so many broken terminfo and termcap definitions. Diagnosed so many flow control glitches and mismatched terminal settings on AT&T 4410s and 605s and Wyse50s and Wyse60s. Done so much blind typing into terinals whose screen contents were completely unrecognizable, that when I see a few strange characters, it takes my brain a moment to recognize that there is actually something wrong.

There are only really two important terminal types that I work with today, and those are "linux" and "xterm". And those work so consistently well these days that I can fully understand the surprise that the non-graybeards must experience when a key isn't mapped right. It's a sign that some of the more stupid crap I used to have to deal with is now truly history. Or at least a rarity. Praise the Lord! (And I'm an atheist!)

The backspace thing was, indeed, an embarrassing issue for the year 2008. Especially since, if I understand correctly, it was not a matter of the erase character not being set, but of the shell not handling the defined erase character properly. But it *does* seem to be history. I'm not sure what the old config was, but when I bring up gnome-terminal in 2008.05 I get bash, and the backspace works just fine. I was expecting to be able to ctrl-alt-F1 to check out a text console, but that doesn't seem to be the right key sequence. Unix is Unix is Unix[1]... except for all those little things we take for granted about our usual flavor. :0

[1] That would be "POSIX-like OS is POSIX-like OS is POSIX-like OS" for you anal retentives regarding Linux not being Unix. But even you have to admit it loses something in the translation. ;-)

Edited 2008-05-06 22:29 UTC