Tag Archives: Unix

Emacs For a Single Line of Text

Posted on 2019-08-27 by jcs

What if you could use Emacs to edit the command line? Wouldn’t that be great? Well, of course, you can. Not only can but almost certainly do. I’m not talking about invoking Emacs from Bash with Ctrl+x Ctrl+e; I’m talking … Continue reading →

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Haldar Reads Reflections on Trusting Trust

Posted on 2019-06-25 by jcs

I’ve written at least twice about Ken Thompson’s Turing Award Lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust and each time I told you to be sure to read it. It describes one of the—if not the—greatest hacks of all time. In the … Continue reading →

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Brian Kernighan & Ken Thompson Chat

Posted on 2019-05-07 by jcs

Last Saturday at the Vintage Computer Festival East, Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson sat down and chatted about some Unix history and other interesting events in Thompson’s life. The chat was billed as “Kernighan interviewing Thompson” but it was really … Continue reading →

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A History of the Development of C

Posted on 2019-03-12 by jcs

Someone posted a pointer to an old (1994) paper of Dennis Ritchie on the development of the C language. I haven’t read it in years and it was interesting to revisit it. The paper, along with several others describing aspects … Continue reading →

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Some Wisdom on Pipelines

Posted on 2019-03-03 by jcs

Over at his blog, Ted Dziuba has posted a valuable piece of wisdom that is easy to forget. The TL;DR on the wisdom is that many tasks for which we instinctively turn to heavy-weight, distributed tools are more easily and … Continue reading →

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What wc Means by Lines

Posted on 2019-02-21 by jcs

Every Unix/Linux user (and maybe Windows users too) is familiar with the wc command that counts characters, words, and lines. It an easy way to see how large a text file is and is often useful in scripts when you … Continue reading →

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Unix and Linux History from Maddog

Posted on 2019-02-12 by jcs

Older readers may know of Jon “Maddog” Hall. Although we hear less from him these days, he’s been a force in the open source movement for many years. I just came across a video in which he talks about Unix … Continue reading →

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The History of cat

Posted on 2018-12-24 by jcs

Over at Two-Bit History Sinclair Target makes the case that although it seems as if computer technology is always advancing and changing, we are still using software that is virtually unchanged from the dawn of the computer age. As a … Continue reading →

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Rob Pike’s Personal Unix History

Posted on 2018-11-12 by jcs

Rob Pike gave an really nice talk on Unix hisotry as he experienced it. If you’re a Unix-head you already know who Pike is. If not, Pike was one of the researchers at Bell Labs who worked on Unix and … Continue reading →

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Little Languages

Posted on 2018-09-16 by jcs

Last month, I wrote about one of John Bentley’s Programming Pearls columns in the Communication of the ACM. Someone has posted another column, this one on Little Languages. I remember reading the column in More Programming Pearls; it instilled in … Continue reading →

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