TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

34 participants
6419 discussions

Re: [TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a user stand point [was dmr note on BSD's sins]

by Doug McIlroy

> tr -cs A-Za-z '\n' | > tr A-Z a-z | > sort | > uniq -c | > sort -rn | > sed ${1}q > > This is real genius. Not genius. Experience. In the Bentley/Knuth/McIlroy paper I said, "[Old] Unix hands know instinctively how to solve this one in a jiffy." While that is certainly true, the script was informed by my having written "spell", which itself was an elaboration of a model pioneered by Steve Johnson. By 1986, when BKM was published, the lore was baked in: word-processing scripts in a similar vein were stock in trade. A very early exercise of this sort was Dennis Ritchie's enumeration of anagrams in the unabridged Merriam-Webster. Since the word list barely fit on the tiny disk of the time, the job entailed unimaginable marshalling of resources. I was mightily impressed then, and still am. Doug

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

by Nemo

On 3 May 2017 at 09:09, Arthur Krewat <krewat(a)kilonet.net> wrote: > Not to mention, you can cat multiple files - as in concatenate :) Along these lines, who said "Cat went to Berkely, came back waving flags." N.

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] [Groff] ASCII Minus Sign in man Pages

by Doug McIlroy

> I believe I was the last person to modify the Linux man page macros. > Their current maintainer is not the kind of groff expert to whom it > would occur to modify them; it would work as well to ask me questions Question #1. Which tmac file to they use? If it's not in the groff package, where can it be found? Doug

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

by Doug McIlroy

With Steve's eloquent grump and cat -v on the table, I can't help re-citing the peerless cardinal sin of less --help | wc Doug

7 years, 8 months

dmr note on BSD's sins

by ron minnich

OK, I recall a note dmr wrote probably in the late 70s/early 80s when folks at UCB had (iirc) extended the symbol name size in C programs to essentially unlimited. This followed on (iirc) file names going beyond 14 characters. The rough outline was that dmr was calling out the revisions for being too general, and the phrase "BSD sins" sticks in my head (sins as a verb). I'm reminded of this by something that happened with some interns recently, as they wanted to make something immensely complex to cover a case that basically never happened. I was trying to point out that you can go overboard on that sort of thing, and it would have been nice to have such a quote handy -- anyone else remember it? ron

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

by Daniel Camolês

There you go: http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/ Em 2 de mai de 2017 17:29, "Diomidis Spinellis" <dds(a)aueb.gr> escreveu: On 02/05/2017 19:11, Steve Johnson wrote: > I recall a paper Dennis wrote (maybe more like a note) that was titled > echo -c considered harmful > (I think it was -c). It decried the tendency, now completely out of > control, for everybody and their dog to piddle on perfectly good code > just because it's "open". > There's definitely Rob Pike's talk "UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful", which he delivered at the 1983 Usenix Association Conference and Software Tools USers Group Summer Conference. Unfortunately, I can't find it online. It's interesting that the talk's date is now closer to the birth of Unix than to the present. Diomidis

7 years, 8 months

Installing Amix on FS-UAE, English Amiga Users's thread

by Michael Huff

I'm this close to figuring out how to get netbsd to work on fs-uae with no prior amiga experience. Searching around the English Amiga Users's board for clues, I found a guide on downloading and installing Amix. Complete with amix download links. Haven't tried it myself -I'm still working on my bsd tangent. But for anyone interested: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=86480

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] was turmoil, moving to rm -rf /

by John Floren

On 2017-04-27, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote: > This is a multipart message in MIME format. > > ------=_NextPart_000_0154_01D2BF90.27157840 > Content-Type: text/plain; > charset="UTF-8" > Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable > > Exec 8 (the Univac Operating Systm) used to make you type the word = >=E2=80=9CCATASTROPHIC=E2=80=9D to proceed past a certain point in = > reiniting the system. > > > ------=_NextPart_000_0154_01D2BF90.27157840 > Content-Type: text/html; > charset="UTF-8" > Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable > ><html xmlns:v=3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" = > xmlns:o=3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" = > xmlns:w=3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" = > xmlns:m=3D"http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml" = > xmlns=3D"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40"><head><meta = > http-equiv=3DContent-Type content=3D"text/html; charset=3Dutf-8"><meta = > name=3DGenerator content=3D"Microsoft Word 14 (filtered = > medium)"><style></style></head><body lang=3DEN-US link=3Dblue = > vlink=3Dpurple><div class=3DWordSection1><p class=3DMsoNormal><span = > style=3D'font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497= > D'>Exec 8 (the Univac Operating Systm) used to make you type the word = >=E2=80=9CCATASTROPHIC=E2=80=9D to proceed past a certain point in = > reiniting the system.</span><span = > style=3D'font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p= >></span></p></div></body></html> > ------=_NextPart_000_0154_01D2BF90.27157840-- > Ron, can you and others who are posting via email please take care to send text-only emails? It's utterly unreadable to anyone using a newsreader or plain old 'mail'. http://i.imgur.com/EJS5Okd.png sorry for going off-topic... john

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] There is turmoil in Linux-land - When did rm first avoid going upwards?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Josh Good > Would the command "cd /tmp ; rm -rf .*" be able to kill a V6 ... system? Looking at the vanilla 'rm' source for V6, it cannot/does not delete directories; one has to use the special 'rmdir' command for that. But, somewhat to my surprise, it does support both the '-r' and '-f' flags, which I thought were later. (Although not as 'stacked' flags, so you'd have to say 'rm -r -f'.) So, assuming one did that, _and_ (important caveat!) _performed that command as root_, it probably would empty out the entire directory tree. (I checked, and "cd /tmp ; echo .*" evaluates to ". .." on V6. Noel

7 years, 8 months

directories going away.

by Ron Natalie

The JHU version of the V6 kernel and the mount program were modified (or should I say buggered) so that unprivileged users could mount user packs. There were certain restrictions added as well: no setuid on mounted volumes etc. The problem came up that people would mount them using relative paths and the mtab wouldn't really show who was using the disk as a result. I suggested we just further bugger it by making the program chdir to '/dev' first. That way you wouldn't have to put /dev/ on the drive device and you'd have to give an absolute path for the mount point (or at least one relative to /dev). I pointed out to my coworker that there was nothing in /dev/ to mount on. He started trying it. Well the kernel issued errors for trying to use a special file as a mount point. He then tried "." Due to a combination of bugs that worked! The only problem, is how do you unmount it? The /dev nodes had been replaced by the root of directory of my user pack. Oh well, go halt and reboot. There were supposed to be protections against this. Mind you I did not have root access at this point (just a lowly student operator), so we decided to see where else we could mount. Sure enough cd /etc/ and mount on "." there. We made up our own password file. It had one account with uid 0 and the name "Game Player" in the gcos field. About this one of the system managers calls and tells us to halt the machine as it'd had been hacked. I told him we were responsible and we'd undo what we did. I think by this time Mike Muuss came out and gave me the "mount" source and told me to fix it.

7 years, 9 months

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TUHS