Tag Archives: Unix

SCO Twenty Years Later

It’s hard for those of us who were there to believe but there is a good number of practicing software engineers who not only don’t remember but perhaps weren’t even born at the time of the SCO/IBM lawsuit over Linux. … Continue reading

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macOS As A Unix Workstation

Torstein K. Johansen has an interesting post on configuring a Mac to be comfortable for a Linux user. Johansen is a self described “die hard Linux user” but recently had to work on a Mac. Macs are Unix machines but … Continue reading

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The rs Command

Dr Drang over at And now it’s all this has an interesting post on the Unix rs command and his use case for it. The “rs” stands for “reshape”. The idea is that given some data arranged in rows and … Continue reading

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More On the Brailsford-Kernighan Video

The video chat between David Brailsford and Brian Kernighan has sparked a lot of interest and commentary among the Unix faithful. Dough McIlroy offered this story concerning egrep to the conversation. The egrep connection is that it was egrep’s regex … Continue reading

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Emacs and the Unix Philosophy

Ramin Honary has a six part series of posts that presses the claim that Emacs does, in fact, adhere to the Unix Philosophy that a program should do one thing and do it well. Almost everyone else’s opinion is that … Continue reading

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Rich Stevens

One of my heroes, perhaps my greatest hero was Rich Stevens. The other day, someone posted a link on reddit to a Salon article about Stevens published a year after his death. It made me remember my huge debt to … Continue reading

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Hints For Writing Unix Tools

Marius Eriksen has a useful post for those not afraid to leave the comfort of the GUI for the command line. It’s long been noted that the ability of Unix to compose tools into pipelines is extraordinarily powerful and makes … Continue reading

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How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Well, not me: Tom Lyon. His post was actually entitled My Summer at Bell Labs and tells the story of his summer internship at the Labs. Regular readers know I’m a sucker for this type of thing so of course … Continue reading

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The Year 2038 Problem

All of you Unix heads know about the coming Unix apocalypse. On January 19, 2038, the 32-bit Unix time variable will overflow and Unix will suddenly think it’s December 13, 1901. Except, of course, virtually all extant Unix systems now … Continue reading

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The Bash Bible

Years ago I remember reading in Kernighan and Pike’s The Unix Programming Environment a quote about how the shell was very often their preferred programming language: When you’re faced with writing a new program, there’s a natural tendency to start … Continue reading

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