ugh.book

272 The File System

AT&T, meanwhile, was trying to sell Unix into the corporate market,

where record locking was required. It came up with the idea of mandatory

record locking. So far, so good—until SVR4, when Sun and AT&T had to

merge the two different approaches into a single, bloated kernel.

Date: Thu, 17 May 90 22:07:20 PDT

From: Michael Tiemann <[email protected]>

To: UNIX-HATERS

Subject: New Unix brain damage discovered

I’m sitting next to yet another victim of Unix.

We have been friends for years, and many are the flames we have

shared about The World’s Worst Operating System (Unix, for you

Unix weenies). One of his favorite hating points was the [alleged]

lack of file locking. He was always going on about how under real

operating systems (ITS and MULTICS among others), one never had

to worry about losing mail, losing files, needing to run fsck on every

reboot... the minor inconveniences Unix weenies suffer with the zeal

of monks engaging in mutual flagellation.

For reasons I’d rather not mention, he is trying to fix some code that

runs under Unix (who would notice?). Years of nitrous and the

Grateful Dead seemed to have little effect on his mind compared

with the shock of finding that Unix does not lack locks. Instead of

having no locking mechanism, IT HAS TWO!!

Of course, both are so unrelated that they know nothing of the other’s

existence. But the piece de resistance is that a THIRD system call is

needed to tell which of the two locking mechanisms (or both!) are in

effect.

Michael

This doesn’t mean, of course, that you won’t find lock files on your Unix

system today. Dependence on lock files is built into many modern Unix

utilities, such as the current implementation of UUCP and cu. Furthermore,

lock files have such a strong history with Unix that many programmers

today are using them, unaware of their problems.