The Unix Haters' Handbook

It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated: Darn. And to think I bought the dead tree version in the mid 90s (I still have the barf bag that came with it). I've certainly heard of them myself, and some of the concepts they came up with have made me want to learn more about each one, but I've yet to actually use any of them. Chapter 1---not so much any more. This was a time (94) when the ANSI-C standard had only been out a few years so there was still quite a bit of K&R C floating around. This was also a time when there were still plenty of Unix versions floating around, instead of the what? Five we have left now? (Linux, Open|Free|NetBSD, Solaris). Chapter 2---mostly user expectations here. And yes, it's still somewhat valid---VMS was a lot more consistent in the command line than Unix ever was. Chpater 3---Eh. They go on about how horrible man pages are, but they're infinitely better than the whole info crap you get nowadays with GNU (god, I love man pages that say crap like "The full documentation for cut is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and cut programs are properly installed at your site, the command info coreutils cut should give you access to the complete manual"). Nowadays you can probably paste any command or error message into Google and find out the problem (but then again, you might find plenty of other people with said problem but no definitive answer). Chapter 4---mail. Or more specifically sendmail. Still relevent, and sadly, the situations presented there are infinitely easier to deal with than the crap I have to deal with today. Chapter 5---Usenet. Strictly speaking, not specifically Unix, and frankly, nowadays, not really relevent all that much (which means, it's probably usuable these days). Replace USENET with Slashdot|Reddit|Digg|etc. Chapter 6---terminals. Not so much anymore. Pretty much vt100/xterm and you're good to go (alhough I still have issues with BS vs. DEL on Linux). Chapter 7---Pretty much spot on, although the alternatives to X Windows are worse (that is, if you want remote capabilities). And sadly, I do miss NeWS (used it in college; was sad when SGI dropped it). Chapter 8---who uses csh anymore? I think we all use bash nowadays, but this still holds up pretty well (man, I can't make heads or tails of the startup scripts on Linux, but then again, I never did learn to really read shell scripts). Chapter 9---Not so much anymore, as more and more people use languages other than C and make (and there are a few alternative to make nowadays). Chapter 10---Dead on. (I don't like C++ 8-P Chapter 11---If anything it's gotten better and worse in my opinion. If you set up Unix correctly, it can run smoothly for years without problems. The major problem comes when you have other users on the system, or trying to get a modern Linux distribution set up correctly (when did "which" become optional? Or "traceroute"? Don't even get me started on so-called "package managers"). Chapter 12---security. Sadly, this book was written before the Internet became as popular as it did and Microsoft showed us just how bad security could get. Or PHP showed us just how bad security could get (really! You can embed PHP in gif files and PHP will gladly execute it! How ... Microsoftian of it ... ). Chapter 13---file systems. They're gotten much better over the years, and even Linux is slowly learning about removable media [1]. Chapter 14---I don't know anyone using NFS anymore (I think the last time I saw NFS in a commercial setting was the late 90s, and even at home, I don't use NFS all that much). But replace NFS with Samba, and it's spot on (more or less). -spc (Been using Unix since 1989 ... ) [1] My own personal theory about Unix: If it wasn't in Unix V7, then it's never been supported all that well under Unix. That explains the crappy support for removable devices, graphical systems and threads.