This talk was (supposed to be ;-)) given at the 2002 ILUG AGM. Unix is in the title, as most of this applies to all Unix' but there are a few linux specific issues discussed. Userspace program options redundancy (the bad kind) regular expressions shells,documentation,configuration,... Kernel <-> Userspace The lower down the the system you go, the more important it is to design a generic future proof interface, so it's especially important for the kernel to get this correct. /dev/mess a proc of shit configuration errors