The Unix Haters Handbook | Hacker News Reader

The Unix Haters Handbook

cs.washington.edu

67 pointsehsanul28 comments

A classic and great book.

For those of us like the primary editor (Simson Garfinkle, a few years younger than me and also a member of MIT's "computer club"), who were not entirely pleased to see UNIX win while too many of the critical concepts behind Multics, ITS, Lisp Machines, NeWS, etc. were lost (well, at least we got job control from ITS), it still has significant value.

And it provides plenty of implicit suggestions on how to make our current systems better.

JWZ and the Powershell designers also make a good point that Unix doesn't separate content from presentation: having to look for text patterns to identify a piece of data isn't good.

Can you summarize Powershell for someone to doesn't get it?

Sure.

   ps <processname> | kill

You piped the object to kill, not the text, so you didn't need a regex. Kill takes an process object as input and kills it. You could probably do that with a subshell on a nix box, which is only a little more ugly, but what about getting processes that have an RSS above a certain size?:

    ps | where-object { $_.WS -gt 500MB } | kill

where-object is a filter, WS is the Windows equivalent of RSS. You've just picked only the objects with an RSS greater than 500MB. No regexs turning text into numbers, no math to turn KB into MB. Just filtering the content based it's properties, not its presentation.

I actually don't use Windows for development as I don't like the languages or the lockin (I've never been able to find something as good as Python on Linux, including IronPython) but I quite like Powershell.

That's very Lispy, actually.

  (defun ps (process-name)
    (labels ((find-proc (name)
  	     (remove-if-not 
  	      (lambda (x) 
  		(string= (bt:thread-name x) name))
  	      (bt:all-threads))))
      (first (find-proc process-name))))
  
  (defun kill (process)
    (bt:destroy-thread process))
        
  ;; usage
  (kill (ps "init"))

And if you remake PS into a generic function you can dispatch on various input types, not just find process by name.

While I was learning Linux, I partly used this book.

Some of issues have been solved, some will never be, but for me it was important to know the other side of the medal. I still use linux. (I know that Linux is not, or it was not last time I checked, 100% POSIX)

Much of the book is still valid, unixes still uses X, which sucks. Plan9 tried to address some of the shortcoming pointed by JWZ, sadly it failed. 10 Things I Hate About (U)NIX[1] and 10 Things I Hate About U(NIX) Revisited[2] are also good reads.

[1]: http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.aspx?p=4244...

[2]: http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.aspx?p=4568...

"This book is ten years old. I started work on it in 1992..."

I remember 1992. I feel old.

I've noticed that the phrase "1990 was twenty years ago" reliably stops people in their tracks with a chilled look on their face.

How about when your coworker is a Linux genius who is younger than Linux!

You mean there are actually people who were born after 1990? How bizarre.

Not only do they exist but some of them are 20 years old ;)

It certainly does for me.

Now I wonder whether that always works, or whether there's something special about the last twenty years that makes 1990 seem surprisingly recent. To me it seems that culturally not much has changed since the 1990s; the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties all have distinct cultural vibes, whereas the 1990s, the 200xs and now our new decade have all sort of blurred together. You wouldn't look _that_ silly today wearing clothes that were fashionable in 1990, and as for 1999... well actually some of my clothes are from 1999.

I had a similar thought the last time I watched "Office Space", that movie is over 10 years old now and the clothes they wore would work well today.

To be honest I'm pretty sure the clothes office workers around here wore to the office in the 70's are about the same today too (although you'd probably see more ties and suits then than now).

I think we can blame the internet for that. Before, time created a huge gulf between each stylistic period as they receded into the past. It was very difficult for someone in the 70's to experience much at all of 50's culture except through the nostalgic ramblings of old folks (which idealized these times heavily).

Now the net has created for us a "long now" where cultural elements are basically assimilated and never forgotten (to emerge later as idealized nostalgia). I think its the fist little nibble of the singularity at our heels.

Perhaps, or perhaps it's just a return to a more normal pace of cultural evolution after the rather unusual 1940-1990 period where an awful lot of stuff changed rapidly.

After all, I can't see much difference between the fashion and culture of 1910 and 1890, though perhaps they'd seem larger to someone living through them.

I think it's just a question of perspective. I think an awful lot of stuff has changed the past 20 years. Think of the effect of Internet. Hell, right now I'm sitting in a Starbucks (also unexistent in 1990) in London, UK and sharing my thoughts real time with people all around the globe! How awesome is that! There are a lot more examples.

In terms of popular culture, musical genres such as boy bands of the 90's, drum and bass, goa, nu-metal have came and gone; some truly remarkable movies have been made, think of Forrest Gump, The Matrix, Amelie or Trainspotting.

More specifically my home country (where I don't live anymore unfortunately) has seen the end of communism and people had to grow used to a capitalist environment which affected every aspect of their lives.

And yes, believe me, you would look extremely silly if you've worn 90's style clothes so please don't.

Half life 1 is an old classic.

Quake 1 is down-right retro.

I remember being surprised the first time I heard someone refer to Duke Nuke'm 3D as an old game (if I can remember getting it when it just came out it's surely a modern game!)

That's not quite as disconcerting as someone five years younger than me referring to music I liked from the late 90s as "oldies."

The fact that The Matrix is 11 years old, and the N64 14, have similar effects.

I wonder if part of it has to do with that the older you get, the more of your life you remember. When I was 5 (which I don't remember), I probably couldn't remember what it was like to be younger than 4 - in other words, I could only remember 20% of my life. When I was 10, I could probably remember about half my life. Now that I'm 23, my earliest memories are around age 7: I remember more than two thirds of my life. But I think that, while growing up, I sort of got used to most of my life being unremembered - so when I'm faced with how much of it I now remember, I somehow feel uncomfortably far from my memory horizon. Thinking about the fact that I've lived more than half my life since the release of the N64, which I remember reasonably well, is disorienting.

My uni had a copy, complete with the "barfbag".

This classic book is worth a look. Funny and well-written, including the anti-preface by Dennis Ritchie.

I'm a UNIX lover, btw :-)

I feel so liberated. All this time, I thought the problem was me.

Isn't there an online HTML version or text version of this book.

There is, and also a wonderful "unixux" unix server simulator. Really very funny.

Here is the original html handbook: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/handbook.html

and UNIXUX: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/login.html

Alternatively, if the PDF format is a problem, you could use the Google Docs viewer: http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.simson.net/ref/...

"I post, therefore I am"

That made me laugh, esp in today's context.

"nice" book

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