On Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 11:26 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:


On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 12:50 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
 

Further digging shows v6 is quite similar.
As I said, by then they know it's an issue and the fd 2 has been introduced.   The place to look is not the utilities, but the shell itself and what the kernel is doing in newproc et al for the tty handler.

The utilities were all using printf so even if the concept was there, it wasn't widely used.

I'll take a longer look, including these places..  though I'm not sure I see the connection to the tty driver...

V7 revamps everything, with printf changed to a routine that writes to stderr. Each program did this differently.
IMO: Sort of two different things >>I think<<. They are related - the idea ( what the OS supplied to each process), as opposed to what/how each utility handled it.

Yea. Mostly i think each program had a different wrapper around stderr to minimize changes to the program...

With typesetter C -- we get dmr's new stdio library (libS.a) replacing Lesk's portable C library.  This was released independent of V6 as what DEC would have called a 'layered product"  that ran on top of V6.    As I said, this is the language that Dennis and Brian describe in K&R (version 1). 

Do we have extant copies of that? So far I have see the kernel patches that were "leaked" but not the rest of it.

With what was becoming UNIX/TS -- which don't seem to have a formal release -- we get what we all think of as the V7 kernel, Bourne's new shell and the new and updated tools suite as part of the system

Yea.

So with V7, as you point out, most, but not all of the utilities have been updated to start using the new compiler (since by then Lesk library is not included), If the code were recompiled, that code would have had to used the new FILE * structure over the small integer fd, for the printf family.   With V6 there were still a handful of utilities in assembler (like snoball IIRC), but by V7 I think most of them had been culled.

And while your point is that you need to look at what each utility implemented, >>I believe<< that the key to Ron's question is what the shell and the kernel supplied [dates the idea], and >>then<< if the utility obeyed the new fd 2 as the error file is when it starts to be more formally enforced. So any further hunting should start there I would think.

Yea. Like many things, there was a transition... the most important bit is the shell. And that was more tricky to read through with the phone at breakfast...

Warner 


Clem

 

Granted, this is a small sample size. There wasn't a huge uptake of stderr/fd2 in v6 it seems, but v7 looks like it had a pass over the code to at least try for all errors going to fd2.

Warner


Warner

On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 5:46 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
I am trying to remember when fd 2 (aka stderr) became a thing. I have a vague memory that it was post-v6 but that may be way off. 


ᐧ