dbinette@van-bc.UUCP (Dave Binette) (01/15/89)
In article <402@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US> root@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US (Mark J. Bailey) writes: >In article <598@tapa.UUCP>, larry@tapa.UUCP (Larry Pajakowski) writes: >> Uuto is also on the 2.2 286 and 386 versions of pre HDP SCO Xenix. ... text deleted ... >The word 'Altos' represents a completely different ball game. Altos has >good equipment, but their PROPRIETARY xenix is *NO* SCO 286. You can't even >take binaries from SCO (ie, products of the cc on SCO) and run them on >the 286 Altos. Something to do with the header formats being different. according to the SCO docs (very roughly quoted) "... Altos has not used the latest microsoft compiler ... ... Altos plans to correct this ..." >While SCO has uuto (and everyone else), it is not at all suprising that >Altos would have left them out. No offense to Altos, they just do things >differently...there own way. thats for sure! The Altos version I used had many ?BSD? utilitys bundled in the development system. Even in the standard utilitys I found that by linking or renaming them there was all kinds of enhancements available. For example the wc command: normally it behaved like the standard Word Count programme it counted words lines and characters. Linking it to wclptb or some such radically enhanced it to also provide info on # of 66 line pages, transmisssion time at various baud rates etc. This was discovered by running 'strings' on the wc programme. There are lots of nice features in the Altos XENIX package, even if you DO have to hunt around for some of them.
mark@cbnews.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) (01/20/89)
In article <2148@van-bc.UUCP> dbinette@van-bc.UUCP (Dave Binette) writes: >For example the wc command: >normally it behaved like the standard Word Count programme >it counted words lines and characters. >Linking it to wclptb or some such radically enhanced it to also provide >info on # of 66 line pages, transmisssion time at various baud rates etc. > >This was discovered by running 'strings' on the wc programme. Sounds like the -v (verbose) option I added to the 4.0BSD wc command. You might try "wc -v" to see if it gives all that stuff. (It's not in 4.3BSD's wc, Rob Pike made them take it out.) I have an alias "count=wc -v" to use this. Mark
wisner@cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bill Wisner) (01/21/89)
>Sounds like the -v (verbose) option I added to the 4.0BSD wc command. >(It's not in 4.3BSD's wc, Rob Pike made them take it out.) Why?
chet@pirate.CWRU.EDU (Chet Ramey) (01/21/89)
[Mark Horton says:] >>Sounds like the -v (verbose) option I added to the 4.0BSD wc command. >>(It's not in 4.3BSD's wc, Rob Pike made them take it out.) and Bill Wisner <wisner@cis.ohio-state.edu> then asks: >Why? [If indeed it was Rob Pike who "made them take it out"] Rob Pike's views concerning `unnecessary' (`frivolous'? :-) options to Unix commands are well known (cf. "cat -v Considered Harmful" (Toronto Usenix, 1983), "The Unix Programming Environment" (IEEE Computer, around 1984, as well as the book of the same name), and an article along the same lines in the second BSTJ Unix issue in '84). He is one of the more vocal `Unix minimalists', and has stated more than once that adding options to an existing program that result in `new behavior' runs counter to the Unix philosophy and should be stamped out (well, that's probably a little strong, but you get the idea). (For example, cat making funny characters visible with -v is at odds with its original purpose, concatenating files. He has used the BSD ls columnation of its file lists as another example of this.) The alternative he has espoused is more small tools that do one specific task (as an example: the implementation of `vis' in "The Unix Programming Environment" to do the job of `cat -v'). I would guess that he thought wc's `-v' option was sufficiently removed from wc's original purpose to be undesirable. (Mark, how much did it increase code size?) I should say that I am not attempting to attribute opinions to Rob that he may not hold; these are merely my interpretations of some of the material he has written. Chet Ramey "His efforts in support of this worthy cause Network Management Group were warmly applauded by the doctors; several Case Western Reserve University nurses also gave him the clap." chet@{cwjcc,pirate}.CWRU.EDU -- "Weekend Warriors" Chet Ramey "His efforts in support of this worthy cause Network Management Group were warmly applauded by the doctors; several Case Western Reserve University nurses also gave him the clap." chet@{cwjcc,pirate}.CWRU.EDU -- "Weekend Warriors"
mark@cbnews.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) (01/24/89)
>[Mark Horton says:] > >>>Sounds like the -v (verbose) option I added to the 4.0BSD wc command. >>>(It's not in 4.3BSD's wc, Rob Pike made them take it out.) > >and Bill Wisner <wisner@cis.ohio-state.edu> then asks: > >>Why? >[Chet Ramey Says:] >I would guess that he thought wc's `-v' option was sufficiently removed from >wc's original purpose to be undesirable. (Mark, how much did it increase >code size?) I didn't measure it, but the mods were pretty simple. Unless it brought in printf which wasn't there before or something like that. (It's been 10 years.) I doubt it added more than 15 lines of code. Actually, this is pretty ironic. I took the wc command, added the page count and transmissions time, put in a header, and called it "count". I used it heavily to estimate uucp transfer times. This was while I was at Berkeley. I thought the tool to be generally useful, so I tried to get it into 4BSD. Bill Joy was at the time trying to reduce the size of the manual by combining several small filters into existing commands*, and he said "no" to count. So I made a -v option to wc instead, and while he didn't care much for the functionality, he felt he couldn't object to adding an option. I thought Rob objected to growth of the system, whether by adding options or commands, but if Chet is right, then Rob and I were in agreement about this without realizing it. Mark * "see" became "cat -vt" "ssp" became "cat -s" "num" became "cat -n" The current UNIX system philosophy seems to be that these should become options to the pr command, in conjunction with the -t option.