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Unix and Flow-Based Programming

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Re: Unix and Flow-Based Programming

#21

Post by SixSigma »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #18
SixSigma wrote: post #2

> Then Tannenbaum came out with his book and it didn’t really take off. > Then Torvalds open-sourced linux and that is what started to gain popularity. cough BSDi cough

To support your point: https://web.archive.org/web/19990224090656/http://www.bsdi.c... Seeing the list, now I'm sure which BSD that SCC likely used in their Sidewinder firewall. They modified it to have mandatory access controls to contain breaches of subsystems. This was before SELinux, etc. Never used BSDi, though, so can't say much about it except its users were getting pretty of mileage out of it given rep of pro…

We used BSDi to launch an ISP in 1995, with 20 modems and 512kbps of bandwidth.

I still have the Cdrom and we do hosting nowadays.

Re: Unix and Flow-Based Programming

#22

Post by teddyh »

epistasis wrote: post #13
RadioactiveMan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Catenate means to connect things together[1], which implies it was named with multiple files in mind. [1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/catenate

I'd think that it's chaining together the characters in the file, catenating a file to the screen. Wikipedia claims that the first version of Unix did a single file. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)#History Whereas "con"catenate means to link separate things together. These are minor distinctions, but if somebody is going to call things "asinine" they should at least get the pedantry correct.

The reference Wikipedia gives for that does not actually say that the original “cat” only took one file name. What is says is that “cat”s predecessor, “pr”, only took one file name, and that “cat” subsumed it.

How’s that for pedantry?

Re: Unix and Flow-Based Programming

#23

Post by hawski »

mtdewcmu wrote: post #8
throwaway999888 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is asinine. Why would a program be called ‘cat’ if it can’t concatenate multiple files? Because he only thinks it's the "echo file to terminal" command. The main use of cat was mentioned in the Programming in the UNIX environment article. > The fact that cat will also print on the terminal is a special case. Perhaps surprisingly, in practice it turns out that the special case is the main use of the program. [.…

Like a lot of people, he overuses cat when it's not needed. `cat FOO | more` is approximately equivalent to `more < FOO`, except the first one spawns an extra process for no reason.

In my opinion it's better to replace `cat FOO | more` with `< FOO more`, because cat is used because people first think that they want to take contents of some file and pass it through some filter.

Re: Unix and Flow-Based Programming

#24

Post by nickpsecurity »

SixSigma wrote: post #21
nickpsecurity wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To support your point: https://web.archive.org/web/19990224090656/http://www.bsdi.c... Seeing the list, now I'm sure which BSD that SCC likely used in their Sidewinder firewall. They modified it to have mandatory access controls to contain breaches of subsystems. This was before SELinux, etc. Never used BSDi, though, so can't say much about it except its users were getting pretty of mileage out of it given rep of pro…

We used BSDi to launch an ISP in 1995, with 20 modems and 512kbps of bandwidth. I still have the Cdrom and we do hosting nowadays.

How much did it cost out of curiosity?

Re: Unix and Flow-Based Programming

#25

Post by SixSigma »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #24
SixSigma wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used BSDi to launch an ISP in 1995, with 20 modems and 512kbps of bandwidth. I still have the Cdrom and we do hosting nowadays.

How much did it cost out of curiosity?

I really can't remember. I didn't order it myself.

Re: Unix and Flow-Based Programming

#26

Post by mtdewcmu »

hawski wrote: post #23
mtdewcmu wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like a lot of people, he overuses cat when it's not needed. `cat FOO | more` is approximately equivalent to `more < FOO`, except the first one spawns an extra process for no reason.

In my opinion it's better to replace `cat FOO | more` with `< FOO more`, because cat is used because people first think that they want to take contents of some file and pass it through some filter.

I didn't know you could put the redirection first. You learn something new every day. Maybe that form would make it more mnemonic for some people, because it more resembles a pipeline.

Re: Unix and Flow-Based Programming

#27

Post by epistasis »

teddyh wrote: post #22
epistasis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd think that it's chaining together the characters in the file, catenating a file to the screen. Wikipedia claims that the first version of Unix did a single file. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)#History Whereas "con"catenate means to link separate things together. These are minor distinctions, but if somebody is going to call things "asinine" they should at least get the pedantry correct.

The reference Wikipedia gives for that does not actually say that the original “cat” only took one file name. What is says is that “cat”s predecessor , “pr”, only took one file name, and that “cat” subsumed it. How’s that for pedantry?

Excellent!
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