angry at gunzip; Why can't systems be a bit more reflective?

[gusl]

argh! I'm getting angry at gunzip. Why is there no default "just decompress"?

Why doesn't my shell detect that I'm having a common problem, and send me a link to the solution? It should be easy to set up a Google search. It shouldn't be too hard to make a collection of common error messages, and troubleshooting pages for them.

Why can't systems be a bit more reflective? (this applies even more to the streak-marks problem I wrote about before, and also to processes that never give up, leaving your machine hanging... do they need to internalize the notion of user utility?)

Comments

[breyten.livejournal.com]

[breyten@breyten ~]$ touch test
[breyten@breyten ~]$ gzip test
[breyten@breyten ~]$ ls -l test*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 breyten breyten 25 Sep 28 14:33 test.gz
[breyten@breyten ~]$ gunzip test.gz
[breyten@breyten ~]$ ls -l test*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 breyten breyten 0 Sep 28 14:33 test
[breyten@breyten ~]$

Aka, here gunzip works as expected. Not sure what problem you're having :)

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I thought gunzip was unzip.
Likewise, I though gzip was zip.
I guess I had a charicature of Unix.

[williamallthing.livejournal.com]

gunzip's pretty fine for me. but wait till you get to those shells that won't let you log out with ^D. (chsh? tcsh? dunno.) every time you hit ^D they say "use 'logout' to logout". well bitch if you can DETECT it, why don't you just log me out?

(And actually if you hit it enough (i.e. hold it down) they actually DO log you out!)

yet another reason to use bash.