Tag Archives: Unix

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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Happy Birthday DMR

Posted on 2018-09-09 by jcs

Today is Dennis Ritchie’s birthday. Take a moment to remember the man who, along with Ken Thompson, invented Unix and changed our world. Those of us in computer related fields would be working in a completely different environment were it … Continue reading →

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Afterword to Kernighan’s Grep Video

Posted on 2018-07-22 by jcs

Speaking of Brian Kernighan, grep, and codas, there’s a (very) short afterward to Kernighan’s excellent video telling the story of the origin of greps’s name. At the end of that video (if you haven’t watched it, you definitely should) Kernighan … Continue reading →

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A Q&A with Brian Kernighan

Posted on 2018-07-21 by jcs

If you enjoyed Brian Kernighan’s video on the genesis of the name “grep”, you will probably also enjoy the three-part Q&A with Kernighan in which he discusses programming, C, and C’s successors. Kernighan is personable and a great speaker so … Continue reading →

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The Genesis of Grep’s Name

Posted on 2018-07-08 by jcs

Virtually everyone in our profession knows about grep and how to use it. But do you know where the name came from? If you’re old enough to remember the pre-Linux days you probably do. If you’ve never worked on a … Continue reading →

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