ugh.book

This Is Internal Documentation? 51

Is this documented somewhere or do I have to buy a source license

and learn to read C?

“man fg” gets me the CSH_BUILTINS man page[s], and I’ve never

been able to find anything useful in there. If I search this man page

for “job” it doesn’t tell me this anywhere. It does, however, tell me

that if I type “% job &” that I can take a job out of the background

and put it back in the background again. I know that this is function-

ality that I will use far more often than I will want to refer to a job by

name.

This Is Internal Documentation? .................................................

Some of the larger Unix utilities provide their own on-line documentation
as well. For many programs, the “on-line” docs are in the form of a cryptic
one-line “usage” statement. Here is the “usage” line for awk:

% awk

awk: Usage: awk [-f source | 'cmds'] [files]

Informative, huh? More complicated programs have more in-depth on-line
docs. Unfortunately, you can’t always rely on the documentation matching
the program you are running.

Date: 3 Jan 89 16:26:25 EST (Tuesday)

From: Reverend Heiny <[email protected]>

To: UNIX-HATERS

Subject: A conspiracy uncovered

After several hours of dedicated research, I have reached an impor-

tant conclusion.

Unix sucks.

Now, this may come as a surprise to some of you, but it’s true. This

research has been validated by independent researchers around the

world.

More importantly, this is no two-bit suckiness we are talking here.

This is major league. Sucks with a capital S. Big time Hooverism. I

mean, take the following for example:

toolsun% mail