11 Nov
2017
11 Nov
'17
12:18 a.m.
On 10 Nov 2017 12:00 -0600, from will.senn(a)gmail.com (Will Senn):
In V7, it's trickier because apropos doesn't
exist, or the
functional equivalent man -k, for that matter and books are hard to
find (most deal with System V or BSD. I do find the command 'find
/usr/man -name "*" -a -print | grep task' to be useful in finding
man pages, but it's not as general as apropos.
So, what was the process of learning unix like in the V7 days? What
were your goto resources? More than just man and the sources? Any
particular notes, articles, posts, or books that were really helpful
(I found the article, not the book, "The Unix Programming
Environment" by Kernighan and Mashey, to be enlightening
https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1981/04/01667315.pdf)?
Semi-related thought, possibly helpful: Did the manuals (I mean the
printed ones) have indexes that were meaningful for such purposes? I'm
thinking something like the output of apropos / man -k, not just a
listing of command names and page numbers.
Sure knowing that the description for how to use ls was in section 1
page 42 might have been _helpful_, but not really for finding out _how
to list files_ in the first place...
--
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se
“People who think they know everything really annoy
those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)