“Evil exists everywhere. Sometimes I think our limited senses are designed to protect us from awareness of its presence. We trust them to provide us with knowledge but it may be that they block out realization of horrors we cannot bear.” (Night of the Ripper)
3 Matching Annotations
- Jul 2025
-
crimereads.com crimereads.com
-
- Dec 2015
-
cms.whittier.edu cms.whittier.edu
-
She referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding overthem and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place. There was something in thisfeeling — the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamberof a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries,the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain (J.G. Ballard, 1975: 40).
This description gives me the creeps.. Makes me think of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" for some reason
-
- Feb 2014
-
unix.stackexchange.com unix.stackexchange.com
-
What is missing is a space between the $( and the following (, to avoid the arithmetic expression syntax. The section on command substitution in the shell command language specification actually warns for that:
This is a very good example of why shell scripting does not scale from simple scripts to large projects. This is not the only place where changes in whitespace can lead to scripts that are very difficult to debug. A well-meaning and experienced programmer from another language, but new to bash scripting, might decide to clean up formatting to make it more consistent-- a laudable goal, but one which can lead to unintentional semantic changes to the program.
Flat, short bash scripts are extremely useful tools that I still employ regularly, but once they begin creeping in size and complexity it's time to switch to another language to handle that-- I think that is what (rightly) has driven things likes Python, Puppet, Ansible, Chef, etc.
Despite the syntactic horrors lurking in shell scripts there is still a beautiful simplicity that drives their use which is a testament to the core unix philosophy.
-