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Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

tuhs.org

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Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#5

Post by knome »

teddyh wrote: post #3

Why does this supposedly old file contain UTF-8 encoded characters? (The apostrophe in “ search in the user’s current directory ” is U+2019, RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK.)

It's not an old file. It's a new file resulting from running OCR on a PDF of a physical manual. Clipping off the filename in the original URL, you'll find a directory [1] with an explanation in the README [2]

[1] http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Mc... [2] http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Mc...

Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#6

Post by mpweiher »

gamache wrote: post #2

There must be some OCR errors in there -- the system call "create" was spelled with an "e"!

Sure about that?

   CREAT(2)                    BSD System Calls Manual                   CREAT(2)

   NAME
        creat -- create a new file

   LIBRARY
        Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

   SYNOPSIS
        #include 

        int
        creat(const char *path, mode_t mode);

   DESCRIPTION
        This interface is made obsolete by: open(2).

        The creat() function is the same as:

              open(path, O_CREAT | O_TRUNC | O_WRONLY, mode);

   SEE ALSO
        open(2)

   HISTORY
        The creat() function appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.

   BSD                              June 2, 1993                              BSD

Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#7

Post by rst »

mpweiher wrote: post #6
gamache wrote: post #2

There must be some OCR errors in there -- the system call "create" was spelled with an "e"!

Sure about that? CREAT(2) BSD System Calls Manual CREAT(2) NAME creat -- create a new file LIBRARY Standard C Library (libc, -lc) SYNOPSIS #include int creat(const char *path, mode_t mode); DESCRIPTION This interface is made obsolete by: open(2). The creat() function is the same as: open(path, O_CREAT | O_TRUNC | O_WRONLY, mode); SEE ALSO open(2) HISTORY The creat() function appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX. BSD June…

You're missing the joke -- the recovered "Unix 0" manual seems to spell it 'create', even though it was 'creat' in subsequent versions.

Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#8

Post by ksherlock »

mpweiher wrote: post #6
gamache wrote: post #2

There must be some OCR errors in there -- the system call "create" was spelled with an "e"!

Sure about that? CREAT(2) BSD System Calls Manual CREAT(2) NAME creat -- create a new file LIBRARY Standard C Library (libc, -lc) SYNOPSIS #include int creat(const char *path, mode_t mode); DESCRIPTION This interface is made obsolete by: open(2). The creat() function is the same as: open(path, O_CREAT | O_TRUNC | O_WRONLY, mode); SEE ALSO open(2) HISTORY The creat() function appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX. BSD June…

    3.5.2 Create

    To create a new file, the following call is used.

         filep = create(name, mode)
But it's listed correctly as a system call.

    A1.6 creat

    To create or recreate a file,

          sys creat
          name
          mode

Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#9

Post by lambda »

mpweiher wrote: post #6
gamache wrote: post #2

There must be some OCR errors in there -- the system call "create" was spelled with an "e"!

Sure about that? CREAT(2) BSD System Calls Manual CREAT(2) NAME creat -- create a new file LIBRARY Standard C Library (libc, -lc) SYNOPSIS #include int creat(const char *path, mode_t mode); DESCRIPTION This interface is made obsolete by: open(2). The creat() function is the same as: open(path, O_CREAT | O_TRUNC | O_WRONLY, mode); SEE ALSO open(2) HISTORY The creat() function appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX. BSD June…

I think he's saying that in this document, "creat" is sometimes spelled with an "e", indicating that the OCR process overcorrected.

  3.5.2 Create
  
  To create a new file, the following call is used.
  
       filep = create(name, mode)

Re: Newly discovered earliest draft of a Unix manual (1971)

#10

Post by luckydude »

Is it just me or are the comments here missing the point? This is the original writeup of Unix. It's amazingly well written and pretty complete for when it was done. This is v0 of Unix, it's barely started.

You could, and people did, write a lot of code with just that doc as documentation.

Maybe it's because I'm a Bell Labs fanboy, I find this doc impressive.

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