Disgusting Kernel Hack

[Laura Creighton]

Over at utzoo they have a wonderful trick that keeps naive users from thinking
that the system died when using a kernel paginator. They don't give it to them.
If you want it, you have to ask for it. If you know enough to ask, then you
know enough to use it. How many people *don't* type break (or something) when
they think that the system has crashed, anyway? Everybody I know does, for
some reason.

The usefulness of a kernel paginator is so that you will never have to say
"drat -- should have run it through p" again, in your life, ever. The
disadvantage is that you have to add code to your kernel and every so
often you decide that you should have disabled pagination before  you did
something. So far, I have had that happen once since Christmas. On the
other hand, I remember that I used to type "|p" onto everything by default.
And when I didn't I regretted being forgetful -- at least 3 times a day.

I think that it is incredibly useful. And I think that pagination is something
that it is justifiable to put into the kernel, simply because the number of
times you do not want something paginated is so rare that it is silly to have to
run every command that has more output than you expected *twice* -- once
to discover that it is long and once to pipe it through something so that
you can get all the information. Living your life ready to type ^S all the
time is not fun. this sort of menial task "if there is more than a screen
length, then assume I typed ^S" is the sort of things that computer programs
are wonderful at. The question is where to put it? Personally, I would rather
hack the kernel (where it is easy) than the shell (where it is hard). Plus,
even people silly enough to still be using the cshell (hi eric!) can get
pagination this way. Hacking every shell seems as good evidence as any that
this thing should have been in the kernel in the first place...but as an
option.

Laura Creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura