Using the Plan9 Plumber Utility (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Using the Plan9 Plumber Utility (2013)

mostlymaths.net

60 pointspmoriarty10 comments

I use plan9 regularly since 2000

In one Acme window I'll be running

    tail -f /n/kremvax/var/log/error-log-of-some-daemon

And then I can plumb the error messages

    runtime error : Var is null at line 45 in /srv/www/cgi/script

I can plumb the error message and Acme will open /n/kremvax/srv/www/cgi/script:45

but for extra fun I could grep script for includes and open them too.

Bear in mind that kremvax is a remote machine.

You can build quite sophisticated rules that fit your workflow. e.g. some URLs open to edit, some to view.

It can even know the difference between which application you are plumbing from.

I'm curious, what do you use plan9 for?

It is an OS designed by the best minds that built Unix such as Rob Pike, Doug McIlroy, Denis Ritchie, Bruce Ellis, Dave Presotto, Tom Duff, Ken Thompson, Russ Cox ... the list of luminaries goes on and on. They built the tools for themselves to use day in day out with no backwards compatibility constraints and no marketing consideration. Its lack of popularity is not because of technical merit.

If you thought Unix was good, the question should be "why don't you use plan9?"

As for me, I'm a humble coder, so I use the tools I find best for that job.

>If you thought Unix was good, the question should be "why don't you use plan9?"

Because I don't control the technical infrastructure of my employer or my employers customers and plan9 is not trivially compatible with that infrastructure.

... Which is why people are interested in what other people are doing with it.

Fair comment. But I learned it in my own time on my own computers.

Anyway, one thing I can add is that it is my screenshot on the Acme wikipedia page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)

It has my plumbing rules for editing my php website

Surprised this got posted, as it is pretty old :D I guess there is a minor Plan9/Acme/Sam renaissance going on these days (many posts related to them.) If you have any questions about Acme, plumber usage or the details in the post please ask here (or drop me an email.)

I've been using plan9 for 15 years, there is a constant renaissance. The Plan9 papers and community Web pages are reposted on a HN regularly if not frequently as each new crop of programmers "discovers" the richness.

Yup, I fell into it during one of its renaissances.

This would be neat for linking to source locations in the terminal and in the console output of an IDE.

That is one of the defaults that ships with plan9. Any text of the form

    [A-z0-9/_.,-]+:[0-9]+

I..e a path with a line number - e.g. /sys/src/lib9/9.h:5

Will open that file in your editor at that line.

The plan9 utiiities, such as grep -n, will present filenames with line numbers in that form.

It is trivial to add your own such that

    Error X in file /path/to/file on line 5

Will do the same.

Before plan9 had a usable html4 renderer I would send URLs to a listener on a Unix machine with firefox to open them there inside my VNC session.

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