2011-04-19



On the machines at my university PAM is used for user login. If I
run slock [0] to lock the screen, it gets locked  but  I  am  not
able to unlock it.  Slock checks the entered password against the
one in /etc/passwd (may be shadowed), but I don't have  an  entry
there.

The point is that slock is not designed to be used in  such  set-
ups.  That's  fine  for  me. However, it's annoying being trapped
when I run slock by habit sometimes. The problem here  is  surely
that  there exists a suckless-tools package which includes slock,
instead some of the tools should probably own packages. But  dis-
tributions don't want some really small tool to have an own pack-
age -- if some xlocker has 10.000 SLOC, no problem,  but  if  one
has  less  than  2.000,  no  way. This is just stupid. As if size
would matter.

Anyway. The admins at university, who don't understand  suckless,
proposed   to  remove  the  suckless-tools  package,  thus  slock
couldn't trap me anymore. This, of course, wasn't what I  wanted.
As they run Ubuntu, I suggested:

     dpkg-statoverride --add root root 000 /usr/bin/slock

This was intended to be a temporary ``fix''.  (I haven't found  a
way  to  simply  remove some file, only to move or change permis-
sions.)

The real place to fix is slock, IMO.  It should check on  startup
if the user will technically be able to unlock afterwards, and if
not, abort.  Hence, I proposed a patch:  [1]



Debian is the Unix system/flavor which I am most  familiar  with.
Now  that  I  started with CRUX, my systems running Debian become
few.  Sometimes, when I'm in a hurry, I'd like to have Debian be-
cause  I  know how everything works ... but the fault is being in
hurry.



Henry asked on debianforum.de about how to  exchange  two  lines,
defined by regexps, in a file.  [2] I proposed  a  solution  with
ed:

     /line1/-1ka
     /line2/-1kb
     'a+1m'b+1
     'b+1m'a
     w
     q

If you know ed, you know you don't need the ones:

     /line1/-ka
     /line2/-kb
     'a+m'b+
     'b+m'a
     w
     q

Well, this is real joy for me! :-)

Unfortunately, others usually step right back as soon as  I  pro-
pose  ed.   They  would rather stress sed with branches, the hold
buffer, and other complex things, or use huge  tools  like  perl.
But  none  of  those  can solve the problem more directly than ed
can.  Sadly this will remain the same as long as they don't speak
the language of ed.

No, ed isn't obsolete!

[0]  http://tools.suckless.org/slock
[1]  http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1104/7594.html
[2]  http://debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=128688


http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>