15 Apr
2008
15 Apr
'08
9:07 a.m.
John Floren wrote:
No news is good news. Sure, you could make grep
blather all over
stderr or something, but why? If you don't get any errors, the program
completed correctly. If you screwed up the syntax or specified a
nonexistent file, you get an error.
However, since GNU tools are so utterly goddamn broken, this may or
may not be the case on any given tool. Try Plan 9 some time and you'll
have a lovely experience... for example, see
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/cat for the proper way to
implement cat.
I have been sick for the last few weeks, so I have been off this list for
a while. My view is unix on the 11 still is the best because the tools worked
as a system rather than being a copy of copy ... of the original.
I have PDP-8 clone and figuring how to get kermit from a Dos laptop
to the machine over the serial link is more important to me than 'the best version of
cat'.
Lets talk about non-broken tools so that we can run the old machines properly
like a terminal emulator that works like a real terminal?
Linux to my knowlage has none. My only gripe about the UNIX mind set is that
they did not have a small screen editor.