Saturday, 3 May 2003
Why must so many Unix utilities mysteriously fail when you don't end the last line of a configuration file with \n? Why why why why why? The answer is not “because your text editor doesn't insert one automatically”. I finally figured out after several weeks of pounding my head against the problem that was the reason why my cron job wasn't running to remount the MO disc on calamity after my parents changed it, was that “00 04 * * * /bin/mount /mnt/mo” wasn't followed by a newline. (Someone remind me why cron's syntax is so obtuse, too?)
Maybe I should just give up and configure emacs and vi to add terminating newlines automatically. It just feels like giving into the user-hostile insanity of it all.
Actually, I need to get some sleep; back to hacking on gprof (it's research, really!) in the morning.
4:12 AM
