Originally published in Linux User and Developer (April 2004). License
In the seventies, there was a television series called "Danger UXB". The UXB stood for "UneXploded Bomb". It was very exciting. This being the seventies, much of the excitement was about the incorrect use of the middle letter as part of the acronym. Unlike these days, when everything is "eXXXtreme", this was considered very controversial. We were only allowed to stay up and watch it if we referred to it as "Danger UEB".
But as a young boy, I found the most thrilling part of the programme to be the curious grammatical state of the word "unexploded". It's crazy! It's a past participle used as a participal adjective, but referring to a potential future. What, as our young stand-up comedians so often rhetorically demand of us, is up with that?
Anyway, the times being what they are, I'm sure there are efforts afoot seeking to update the Danger UXB series. I can envisage a "Danger Exploding Bomb" being more trendy - a simpler construction, for a simpler age. The sequel, "Danger Exploded Bomb" will be less popular, I imagine.
But if I was going to base a film on the series, instead of the usual Hollywood monkeys, I think I would call it "Danger UDT". The UDT would stand for "Undeleted Dot File". (Perhaps if they wanted to truly preserve the thrilling anarchy of the original, they could call it "Danger U.T". But I digress. Badly.)
My film would start by someone - Lindsay Lohan, hopefully - casually typing "ls -al ~" one day, and then vomiting in horror (off screen). What the hell are all of those files doing in her inner sanctum? Run credits.
The rest of the film would revolve around a team of experts picking through the 187 (in my case) configuration files. Who made them? What do they mean? And - in a throwback to Danger UXB - what happens if you try to delete them?
The answer is there's no way to know. Some of these little wires aren't connected to anything - they're just the little fossilised droppings of ancient programs that one installs out of curiosity, runs once, watch aghast as they dump core all over our living room floor, and then frogmarch out of ~/bin.
Others are obviously the vital configuration files that make up our very existence. There's about fifteen years of collated voodoo in my muttrc, for instance. There are lines in there copied out of grimoires written by Hermes Trimegistus. To delete those would be like chopping out bits of my brain on the grounds that I need more room in my skull. Cutting the red wire, indeed.
Out of those 187 files, there are about a 183 of them that may be essential, or frivolous, or both. Who knows?
How about ".rnd"? It's owned by root, so it's probably important, right? But doesn't ".rnd" mean that it's a store of random numbers? Why am I supposed to keep that around? Just in case I need the same random numbers in the future? "Uh oh, we ran out of entropy. Maybe we can recycle some of that old entropy?"
And that's not even to mention the dot directories. I don't even dare look in those. You can tell when it's a bad idea to delete an old dot directory when even an upgrading application won't touch it.
I have a .gnome2, and a .gnome2_private directory - but I also have a .gnome and a .gnome_private which is presumably full of stuff that Gnome itself doesn't dare move. Also a .desktop and .gnome-desktop directory. I have a .gaim directory and a .gaimxxx directory. I have a .mozilla, a .phoenix, a .firefox and .mozilla-firefox directory. I'm really pleased that Mozilla is backwardly-compatible in everything but its own name. But isn't this kind of backwards-compatibility the equivalent of the Danger UXB team dealing with UneXploded Bombs by just burying them a bit deeper under the ground, and moving the children's playground over a few feet?
It's not all bad. Some of the files are commented. Indeed, some of them are entirely comments. The file called .charmrc, for instance, has three lines of configuration, and 217 lines of comment. I'm not complaining, mind you - at least that means I can deduce that it's from LiveJournal entry editor. Something that has three lines, followed by hundreds of comments, has to be connected with LiveJournal somehow, right?
So, after careful consideration, I think I can delete that one file, safe in the knowledge that it will only be days before I really badly need the password to my secret livejournal account, which is safely stored... Damn!
And this point in the movie, I think we accidentally blow up Lindsay Lohan's .Xdefaults settings, and everybody loses their job. It's kind of a sad, downbeat ending, but then the male lead makes this long speech about how, even though they failed this time, at least they don't have to mess with the Windows Registry, and everyone feels much better. The end.