Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

user.eng.umd.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 286 posts

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#71

Post by thekaleb »

nix23 wrote: post #20
lalalandland wrote: post #9

"Anyway, have you ever tried to use man? It's fine as long as you know what you are looking for. How would you ever find out the name of command given just the function you wanted to execute? You can't. " One of my gripes with UNIX systems is how opaque they are

You should try 9front (Plan9) it's kind of the evolution of the Unix philosophy. http://9front.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

One of my favorite features of plan9 is how it handles the bin directory.

For one, you can have sub-directories inside the bin directory. This lends to a nice hierarchy of commands and encourages writing small single purpose commands instead of large monolith commands. An example of this is the `ip/ping` command.

Another feature uses the union file system which prevents me from having to mess with $PATH locating commands.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#72

Post by 411111111111111 »

fouc wrote: post #54
macdice wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. I want it to be improved but I fear it is becoming irrelevant. There are very few OSes left to be compatible with...

It's depressing to think that the Cambrian explosion that lead to a variety of hardware, software, operating systems, and web browsers and great freedom and power for the end user is gradually getting culled and turning into a monoculture of walled gardens and the end users are just getting screwed.

Linux is considered a walled garden? Really?

I mean yeah, there were more operating systems before, some of which were open.. but I'm not convinced it's necessarily bad to have one open system win.

If it didn't, I'm pretty sure there would be a lot more people using windows servers, which I think would've been far worse for the open community.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#73

Post by einpoklum »

arexxbifs wrote: post #53
reagent_finder wrote: post #44

Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later. POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It's been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes. Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a' means "check first" and upper-case `A' means "delete all my disk files without asking" (or somethi…

Completely agree. One of the problems is of course the freedom of choice a Unix system gives you. Instead of a single shell with a single set of commands, people can pick and mix. For beginners it's a nightmare but for power users it's, in general, very empowering. Getting help on Unix commands, particularly in Linux, has always been a mess. On most Linux distros, typing "help" will give you help about the shell buil…

> For beginners it's a nightmare

I've taught undergraduate students some basic shell use for being able to compile their C programs. It's not really that bad. You have them use bash and you teach them some basic syntax and a few shell-usable programs, including man. You tell them that there is a lot of things the shell can do that we won't be discussing, so they have to be careful not use arbitrary symbols and to double-quote names. And I also tell them that bash is just one kind of shell, and that some systems have other shells by default, but we are working on a system which defaults to bash. I then tell them to check with "echo $SHELL" if they're on another system than the one we are working on, and if they don't see "/bin/bash" or "/usr/bin/bash" then they should ask someone for help.

That's enough to satisfy newbies in my experience.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#74

Post by fredsmith42 »

I just finished a contract at a client that still has a live OpenVMS system running a mission critical application. It was interesting to compare my 25 year old fond memories of the OS with the practical experience of using it on a daily basis. No command line history, crazy long file paths, and case insensitive passwords were a shock. On the other hand, the built in DCL programming language was a saving grace. My wife, amazingly, found my decades-old copy of the "Writing Real Programs in DCL" book. Because of that, I looked like a VMS superhero.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#75

Post by IggleSniggle »

arexxbifs wrote: post #53
reagent_finder wrote: post #44

Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later. POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It's been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes. Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a' means "check first" and upper-case `A' means "delete all my disk files without asking" (or somethi…

Completely agree. One of the problems is of course the freedom of choice a Unix system gives you. Instead of a single shell with a single set of commands, people can pick and mix. For beginners it's a nightmare but for power users it's, in general, very empowering. Getting help on Unix commands, particularly in Linux, has always been a mess. On most Linux distros, typing "help" will give you help about the shell buil…

Been using “man” for years, understand it’s section system and have made a few man pages for various utility programs I’ve made.

The man page for built-ins is never the quick reference I want, so I generally end up falling back to google for that stuff rather than try and figure out where it’s documented.

Anyway, TIL “help” is a command I can try.

I haven’t used it in awhile, but “cht.sh” is basically what I expect “man” to give me, but comprehensively, for everything, and by the program author(s).

Public repos with easily searchable source and a good README are even better tho, of course.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#76

Post by lioeters »

reagent_finder wrote: post #44

Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later. POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It's been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes. Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a' means "check first" and upper-case `A' means "delete all my disk files without asking" (or somethi…

> Have you ever tried to read git documentation? It is the most useless godawful piece of nonsense

I ran "man git" for the first time ever.

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/git.1.html

Heey, that's actually pretty good! I don't think it's "godawful". In the second sentence it recommends starting with gittutorial and giteveryday, for a "useful minimum set of commands".

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/gittutorial.7.html

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/giteveryday.7.html

I must admit, I still occasionally (regularly?) search for "magic incantations", particular combinations of flags for sed, git, rsync, etc. But the man pages are my first go-to, and they usually do the job as a proper documentation system. It's better than most software I've worked with outside (or on top) of the OS, with their ad-hoc, incomplete or outdated docs.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#77

Post by arexxbifs »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #75
arexxbifs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. One of the problems is of course the freedom of choice a Unix system gives you. Instead of a single shell with a single set of commands, people can pick and mix. For beginners it's a nightmare but for power users it's, in general, very empowering. Getting help on Unix commands, particularly in Linux, has always been a mess. On most Linux distros, typing "help" will give you help about the shell buil…

Been using “man” for years, understand it’s section system and have made a few man pages for various utility programs I’ve made. The man page for built-ins is never the quick reference I want, so I generally end up falling back to google for that stuff rather than try and figure out where it’s documented. Anyway, TIL “help” is a command I can try. I haven’t used it in awhile, but “cht.sh” is basically what I expect “…

I think the availability of "help" depends on what shell you're using. It's a builtin in bash.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#78

Post by [deleted] »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #62
m463 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> largely (functionally) indistinguishable from a UNIX machine Although they were functionally similar, there were some practical considerations... I will say that path names in unix were a simple and elegant , compared to what VMS used. I recall VMS paths were something like [foo.bar.bletch]something.txt At the time this was a little cumbersome, but looking back it is much worse.

That's a cosmetic difference. The real difference is when you try to work out whether your binaries are (supposed to be) in /bin, /usr/local/bin, /sbin, etc, whether settings for a specific application and/or daemon are in $config or $.cfg or $.conf or $.cf or $d_config or .ssh and .bshrc in your personal directory, and where your web server and mail logs are. Because they might be in /var/log - or equally they might…

[deleted]

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#79

Post by jgtrosh »

alxlaz wrote: post #46
jgtrosh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying it didn't exist, just saying it's not an introductory high-level Linux user-space documentation. Also not saying apropos is incomprehensible, just that 1 it sounds weird as a Frenchman, 2 there could have been a simpler alternative: “about”.

Lots of Unix commands could have had better names :). FWIW, though, the noun form is even less uncommon in languages that borrowed the expression from French. In my native language (also a Latin language, so borrowing it was straightforward), its use a noun is very limited. Saying that a book is "full of à-propos" (as in "pleine d’à-propos"), for example, wouldn't mean it's apt, or very relevant, it would mean that i…

Yeah, I guess it's not that bad. (Also it's not a noun, but an adverb, my bad.) Then my only gripe is that it doesn't really sound correct in the syntax, but then again many other commands don't either (like cd, more/less/head, man, du)

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#80

Post by squibbles »

VMS - Dying, dead, or reborn? For those who lament the loss of VMS, know that Windows NT carried on. [0] (By the way, did you know that WNT is a Caesar cipher for VMS?)

Long ago I had my personal trials and tribulations with Unix. Fortunately, OS/9 [1] was there to help with that journey of discovery.

[0] https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vm...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9

Post reply on HN