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Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

>This isn't a Unix pitfall, it's a Debian pitfall.

And that is an example of why I do not run Debian any more: (1) it assumes that I have nothing better to do than learn all of the details of the Debian system and (2) as soon as some complication like this dots-in-filenames thing makes it into stable, it is very difficult to remove because most Debian maintainers consider it-might-break-existing-code a winning argument.

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"It might break existing code" is usually a winning argument. It takes a very strong opposing argument to beat it. If you don't believe in this, I don't want to use any of your code.

I can see how server software needs to be more conservative about making changes. I'm glad I am not using server software anymore for my personal software environment.

On the other hand, CentOS 5 has run-parts, but it doesn't have a --help option or a manpage. The Debian one does.

What do you use instead?

Slackware. As usual, takes the good bits out of both RedHat's and Debian's run-parts. It allows .{whatever} but ignores obvious, well-known suffixes like .bak etc.

From man run-parts: run-parts automatically skips files with certain suffixes that are generally associated with backup or extra files. Any file that ends in one of these will be silently ignored: ~ ^ , .bak .new .rpmsave, .rpmorig .rpmnew .swp

CentOS/Redhat or you could go full Unix with FreeBSD. Lots of other options too.

I switched to OS X in 2009. At the point I had been running Linux for 12 years, and GNU and Emacs on proprietary Unix for the 5 years before that.

I was a Linux user since 1997, but switched to OS X in 2009.

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