37 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
37 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful
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At the USENIX Summer Conference of 1983 [Rob Pike](http://herpolhode.com/rob/)
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made a presentation titled '*UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful*' and
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together with Brian Kernighan wrote the paper '*Program Design Design in the
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UNIX Environment*' ([pdf version](unix_prog_design.pdf), [ps
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version](unix_prog_design.ps)).
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This was a prelude for their famous book [The Unix Programming
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Environment](http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/upe/) that today is considered *the
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bible of Unix*.
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Unfortunately their advice has been completely ignored, and today Unix has become
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overcome by exactly the kind of mistakes they warned against.
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Bell Laboratories
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Murray Hill, NJ (dec!ucb)wav!research!rob
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It seems that UNIX has become the victim of cancerous growth at the hands of
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organizations such as UCB. 4.2BSD is an order of magnitude larger than Version
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5, but, Pike claims, not ten times better.
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The talk reviews reasons for UNIX's popularity and shows, using UCB cat as a
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primary example, how UNIX has grown fat. cat isn't for printing files with line
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numbers, it isn't for compressing multiple blank lines, it's not for looking at
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non-printing ASCII characters, it's for concatenating files.
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We are reminded that ls isn't the place for code to break a single column into
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multiple ones, and that mailnews shouldn't have its own more processing or joke
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encryption code.
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Rob carried the standard well for the "spirit of UNIX," and you can look
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forward to a deeper look at the philosophy of UNIX in his forthcoming book.
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