Unix Archive

"One of the fun examples among all the copyright fuss is the extreme example of copyright claims made by AT&T some time in the 1980s. It's the /bin/true program. This is a dummy' library program whose main function is to make it easy to write infinite loops (while true do ...) in shells scripts. The 'true' program does nothing; it merely exits with a zero exit status. This can be done with an empty file that's marked executable, and that's what it was in the earliest unix system libraries. Such an empty file will be interpreted as a shell script that does nothing, and since it does this successfully, the shell exits with a zero exit status. But AT&T's lawyers decided that this was worthy of copyright protection." Three blank lines. Copyrighted. You can't make this stuff up.

Way back in 2002, MIT decided it needed to start teaching a course in operating system engineering. As part of this course, students would write an exokernel on x86, using Sixth Edition Unix (V6) and John Lions' commentary as course material. This, however, posed problems.

Twitter is currently buzzing about the death of Dennis Ritchie, the visionary creator of UNIX and C, among other things. We hope it's just a false rumor. Story developing, we will be updating. Update: Unfortunately, it seems to be confirmed. Rob Pike, co-creator of the Plan 9 and Inferno OSes, who has worked with Ritchie in the past, and he's currently working for Google's GO language, posted this.

"The proc filesystem is a special filesystem found on most UNIX-based systems. It holds a great deal of information, in ASCII format, most of which is not very friendly to the average user. I've made a list of some of the files i find to be of most use."

What would have happened if the ST had run a BSD based UNIX rather than TOS and GEM? "To run Unix effectively we needed some hardware that was very fast, that was simple enough to put into a minor spin of the ST’s memory controller with little project risk, and that would still provide some kind of memory relocation and protection. The ability to have separate address spaces to isolate processes would be good, too."

Good news: the UNIX copyrights owned by Novell will not fall in the hands of Microsoft as part of the IP purchase by Redmond. "Novell will continue to own Novell's UNIX copyrights following completion of the merger as a subsidiary of Attachmate," states John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer at Novell. Yeppers.

"Hewlett-Packard is rolling out Update 5 for the HP-UX Unix operating system that runs its Itanium and PA-RISC lines of Integrity and HP 9000 servers, keeping to its pattern of two updates per year for its flagship operating system. As has been the case with the prior HP-UX updates, the changes are important to existing HP-UX shops, but they're probably not going to cause a stampede of buyers for HP-UX systems. It's no different with the updates to IBM's AIX or Sun Microsystems' Solaris Unixes do."

Do you know what to do when the performance of your UNIX network and the speed at which you can transfer files or connect to services suddenly comes to a stop? How do you diagnose the issues and work out where in your network the problems lie? This article looks at some quick methods for finding and identifying performance issues and the steps to start resolving them.

"Earlier this year, people in many places wrote about the 40th anniversary of the moment Ken Thompson sat down and started to work on UNIX (which is actually in August). In fact, UNIX celebrates another birthday this year, even though on a slightly smaller scale. In July 1974, exactly 35 years ago, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson published the first version of their seminal paper The UNIX Time-Sharing System in the Communications of the ACM."

Gary Anthes offers an overview history of Unix forty years since Ken Thompson banged out the first version in assembly language for a wimpy DEC PDP-7 minicomputer, spending one week each on the operating system, a shell, an editor, and an assembler. Also included in the package are a year-by-year time line of its evolution, and profiles of Unix giants David Korn, Rick Rashid, and Gordon Bell.

Even though the old-world UNIX operating systems, like IRIX and HP-UX, have been steadily losing ground to Linux for a long time now, they do still get updated and improved. HP-UX 11i v3 is supposed to get update 4 tomorrow, with a host of new features that won't excite you if you're used to Linux, but they're still pretty useful for HP-UX users.

Take a look at some systems that enable you to trace the execution of applications and work out what they are doing without having to make any modifications to the source code, and even without having to stop and restart the application. See how with tracing alone, you can find and diagnose problems with just a few commands.

The man has been dead for over two hundred years, but no one can deny his genius when it came to coming up with clever quotes that people would be repeating centuries after his death. Though nobody living in the 18th century could foresee the computer technology we benefit from today, Franklin's wise words can be applied to really any aspect of life, and Martin Streicher has applied ten of Franklin's famous quotes to the area of UNIX systems administration. Read the full article for some helpful hints in administration all sparked from our dear friend Franklin himself, covering everything from security to the wisdom in frugality.

UNIX's method of handling file systems and volumes provides you with an opportunity to improve your systems' security and performance. This article addresses the issue of why you should split up your disk data into multiple volumes for optimized performance and security.