ugh.book

26 Welcome, New User!

Unix utilities. As a result, some utilities take their options preceded by a

dash, some don’t. Some read standard input, some don’t. Some write stan-

dard output, some don’t. Some create files world writable, some don’t.

Some report errors, some don’t. Some put a space between an option and a

filename, some don’t.

Unix was an experiment to build an operating system as clean and simple

as possible. As an experiment, it worked, but as a production system the

researchers at AT&T overshot their goal. In order to be usable by a wide

number of people, an operating system must be rich. If the system does not

provide that fundamental richness itself, users will graft functionality onto

the underlying framework. The real problem of consistency and predict-

ability, suggests Dave Mankins, may be that Unix provided programmers

outside AT&T with no intellectual framework for making these additions.

Date: Sat, 04 Mar 89 19:25:58 EST

From: [email protected]

To: UNIX-HATERS

Subject: Unix weenies at their own game

Unix weenies like to boast about the conceptual simplicity of each

command. What most people might think of as a subroutine, Unix

weenies wrap up as a whole command, with its own argument syntax

and options.

This isn’t such a bad idea, since, in the absence of any other inter-

preters, one can write pretty powerful programs by linking together

these little subroutines.

Too bad it never occurred to anyone to make these commands into

real subroutines, so you could link them into your own program,

instead of having to write your own regular expression parser (which

is why ed, sed, grep, and the shells all have

similar, but slightly different understandings of what a regular

expression is).^5

The highest achievement of the Unix-aesthetic is to have a command

that does precisely one function, and does it well. Purists object that,

after freshman programmers at Berkeley got through with it, the pro-

gram “cat” which concatenates multiple files to its output^6 now has

(^5) Well, it did occur to someone, actually. Unfortunately, that someone worked on a
version of Unix that became an evolutionary dead-end.