The other day, I wrote about using the BSD Unix sources to learn from the masters. Even though I’ve read through most of those resources, I’m always on the lookout for more. Happily, I’ve come across another great resource, The UNIX Kernel Source Tour. They’ve got the sources for the Linux, FreeBSD, Univ V7, and 4.3 BSD kernels.
These kernel sources are on line so it’s easy to spend a few minutes looking at one of the files. Did you ever wonder how Unix pipes work? Here’s the V7 implementation. It’s a short file and easy to understand. If you spend a few minutes everyday looking at one of these files, you will soon find yourself understanding how Unix works and how the masters code.
We really do live in a wonderful time. When I started, Unix was a closed source black box. You could read papers and books about it but you couldn’t really examine the code. Now we have an embarrassment of riches.