[geeks] old signatures...

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

A geeky topic just popped into my head.

Are any of you guys packrats with your filesystems?

I tend to be.  I keep everything I can, and I also frequently keep
configurations for years, sometimes >10 years with little or no change.
(That's one thing that irks me about modern environments and their
continuously changing and non-human editable meta information).

This popped into my head today after finishing yet another move of my
files and account data to a new desktop install.  Some of the files I
have are dated in the 1980s.

My ~/.plan file was created in the fall of 1989, and has remained
unchanged since then, and moved from minicomputes to Sun mainframes, to
my own personal UNIX systems for the last 17 years.

Some files come from micro and minicomputers as far back as 1985, and
there are at least a few from IBM mainframes.

In fact, I still used a program I wrote for MVS on UNIX until about
1997.

Sadly, I lost a ton of old files some years back due to failure and not
enough budget to recover.  That, and write-only backups on 4mm tape.

Now *that* was a hard lesson...

Anyone else out there a filesystem packrat?

Incidentally, my 17 year old .plan file:

	Before God 'tis a shame that thou, lord, must be lost, who art in
	life so noble!  To meet his match among men, Marry, 'tis not easy!
	To behave with more heed would have behoved one of sense, and that
	dear lord duly a duke to have made, illustrious leader of leigmen in
	this land as befits him; and that better would have been than to be
	butchered to death, beheaded by and elvish man for an arrogant
	vaunt.  Who ever heard tell of a king such courses taking, as
	knights quibbling at their Christmas games!

Ah, I have my .project file from 1990 as well:

% cat .project
Subversion...

Does anyone else worry that they sometimes forgot to preserve timestamps
when moving files?

I have always wish UNIX and other systems had an original data stamp in
them, and have never really liked how they handled change/modify stamps.






-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["I wish life was not so short. Languages
take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about." - J.
R. R. Tolkien]