On Saturday, 8 February 2020 at 9:37:22 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: That brings back another recollection, not Unix-related. In about 1978 I was getting fed up with the lack of clear text error messages from Tandem's Guardian operating system. A typical message might be FILE SYSTEM ERROR 011 Yes, Tandem didn't use leading 0 to indicate octal. This basically meant ENOENT, but it was all that the end user saw. By chance I had been hacking in the binaries and found ways to catch such messages and put them through a function which converted them into clear text messages. For reasons that no longer make sense to me, I stored the texts in an external file, which required a program to update it. Early one morning I was playing around with this, and for the fun of it I changed the text for error 11 from "File not found" to "Please enter FUP PURGE ! *" (effectively rm -f *). I was still giggling about this when the project manager came to me and said "Mr. Lehey, I think I've done something silly". Thank God for backups! We were in a big IBM shop, and the operators religiously ran a backup every night. Nothing lost. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA