Beware of ls --color on Unix

I ran into a ver interesting problem today.



I was trying to redirect the output of the 'ls' command to a file.



$ ls
1.dat 2.dat 3.dat
$ ls > log



To my surprise the output file contained lots of 'special' characters'.

$ vi log

^[[00m^[[00m1.dat^[[00m^

[[00m2.dat^[[00m^

[[00m3.dat^[[00m^

[[00mlog^[[00m^[[m



This was giving several errors in some other process that was using this file.



After spending an hour on this problem, I figured out that the culprit was an 'alias' that had mapped 'ls' to 'ls --color'. This had caused the output to contain the escape sequences for colors.



The problem got resolved by unaliasing with 'unalias ls'.

Java is verbose

While I had read and heard this several times, I never really understood till today what it meant when people said Java was verbose.

Today, for the first time, I accept the veracity of this sad fact. Java is indeed very verbose; specially when compared to new languages. Suddenly I can see how most of the code I write in java can be avoided.

Job ad trap

Read this in a job ad recently.

You may occasionally need to be on calls....some weekend work on production releases may be required , but no actual shift work.

Take my advice. Don't fall into this trap. Not only will you work extra hours, you will not get compensated for it either. Negotiate for shift job.