Huh, I had never seen this one before.
Not sure if it is actually useful.

Anyone here use it much?

yes | rm /

I guess that is like deltree *.* /Y

Kind of.

yes | rm -R /

man yes

"man yes" -> "output a string repeatedly until killed"

See, this is what's wrong with Unix.  There's NOTHING about the word "yes" that says to ME "output a string repeatedly until killed" -- but that's what it means to Unix.

What's wrong with "repeat", or "emit_forever"?  And if you WANTED to output a string repeatedly, there's no 'reverse lookup' that would tell you some RAVING LUNATIC put that behavior under the magic word "yes".

And note "no" gets no "special" abilities -- which if "yes" was so special, shouldn't "no" do something special too?

Gahhhhhhh!

yes no

> man yes

woman headache

"There is no logic to the name" - StH

Agreed, until you know what the first guy who wrote it used it for.

He had some program that kept asking "Continue? (Y/N)" To skip all the prompts, he wrote yes and piped it in.

"There's NOTHING about the word "yes" that says to ME "output a string repeatedly until killed" -- but that's what it means to Unix."

Yes there is. It's a pun on yes men, people who say yes to everything.

"What's wrong with "repeat", or "emit_forever"?"

Are you nuts? Who is going to type "emit_forever" on a command line? 

"And if you WANTED to output a string repeatedly, there's no 'reverse lookup' that would tell you some RAVING LUNATIC put that behavior under the magic word "yes"."

Again, yes there is a reverse lookup. Try "man -k" (-k for keyword search).

See, the trouble is that Unix was designed for people with a sense of humor. If you lack that vital attribute you will not be happy. Unix was not written with literal "Captain Obvious" types in mind :-)

>> There's NOTHING about the word "yes" that says to ME "output a string repeatedly until killed" -- but that's what it means to Unix.  <<

Unix is like the Star Trek TNG episode where Picard is trapped on the planet with the alien who spoke in terms of shared experience.  If you didn't know their race's history and context, you couldn't understand them.

Right. "Unix" was evolved. Many things are agreed upon instead of mandated by a single entity.

Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

nonono is an alternative.

Tanagra, the tasty salad dressing that's also a shoe polish.

Oh!  How sweet, a 'man' option I was unaware of until now.

Note "man man" says the -k option "is equivalent to apropos".  So now, you have to know what "apropos" does -- OR, your sysadmin has had to enable apropos, because I don't think it's enabled by default.

But thanks for that -- that will help a lot in the future.  Clearly I've needed it for a really long time.

Before man -k/apropos can be used the sysadmin has to create the keyword index the first time round. This is usually an operation that has be performed manually after the system is installed.