29 Sep
2012
29 Sep
'12
9:43 a.m.
I saw a lightning talk on Tursday by one of the maintainers of SmartOS, a
fork of Illumos, itself a fork of OpenSolaris. He recently discovered that
there were some interesting things in /usr/bin that most people don't
realize are there, that had stowed away unnoticed over the years: bfs and
ta. He demoed them for us, and I have to say I'm sort-of shocked that they
never got rm(1)ed.
Does anyone here remember using these when they were new/actually useful?
And speaking of ta, the presenter wasn't sure how you're supposed to drive
it - it is supposedly 'like troff -a' but no matter what input he gave it
(man page sources mostly), all he ever got out of it is 'unknown input
character blah'.
Alexey