The Unix Haters' Handbook

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Saturday 05 April 2008 19:10, Sean Conner wrote:
>   Chapter 1---not so much any more.  This was a time (94) when the ANSI-C
> standard had only been out a few years so there was still quite a bit of
> K&R C floating around.  

What's wrong with K&R C?   <ducking>   :-)

(Snip)
>   Chpater 3---Eh.  They go on about how horrible man pages are, but they're
> infinitely better than the whole info crap you get nowadays with GNU (god,
> I love man pages that say crap like "The full documentation for cut is
> maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and cut programs are properly 
> installed at your site, the command info coreutils cut should give you
> access to the complete manual").

Yeah...

Talk about a truly *horrible* user interface!  At least some of that stuff is 
available in HTML,  which if I'm not happy with it I can hack away at...

> Nowadays you can probably paste any command or error message into Google and
> find out the problem (but then again, you might find plenty of other people
> with said problem but no definitive answer).

That's happened to me already,  on a number of occasions.

>   Chapter 4---mail.  Or more specifically sendmail.  Still relevent, and
> sadly, the situations presented there are infinitely easier to deal with
> than the crap I have to deal with today.

I started to look at all the bits involved in mail a while back,  then got KDE 
going (my initial install and first year or two of running linux did not 
include a GUI :-),  and once I found that I could get kmail to deal with all 
of that it sort of short-circuited the whole mess.  Now I'm starting to think 
about looking at it again because of things like a message I want to send to 
another user on the LAN here having to go through Verizon's servers. :-(  
There's a pretty lively discussion currently going on in the local LUG about 
somebody else dealing with all of those issues that I'm following with 
interest.

>   Chapter 5---Usenet.  Strictly speaking, not specifically Unix, and
> frankly, nowadays, not really relevent all that much (which means, it's
> probably usuable these days).  Replace USENET with
> Slashdot|Reddit|Digg|etc.

Heh.  Once in every really long while I fire up my news reader,  and maybe 
I'll poke around in some newsgroups and maybe I'll just look a bit for 
certain specific material,  but that's about it.  I do remember what it was 
like before the web,  though.   And there are still lots and lots of clueless 
posters,  no doubt about that...

(Snip)
>   Chapter 8---who uses csh anymore?  I think we all use bash nowadays, but
> this still holds up pretty well (man, I can't make heads or tails of the
> startup scripts on Linux, but then again, I never did learn to really read
> shell scripts).

I'm certainly no expert on that stuff,  but have managed to poke around them 
to the extent where I can often follow what's going on.  :-)  There's a 
product out there I think I probably found at freshmeat called "Advanced Bash 
Scripting Guide" that's pretty good.

(Snip)
>   Chapter 10---Dead on.  (I don't like C++ 8-P

I don't either.

>   Chapter 11---If anything it's gotten better and worse in my opinion.  If
> you set up Unix correctly, it can run smoothly for years without problems.
> The major problem comes when you have other users on the system, or trying
> to get a modern Linux distribution set up correctly (when did "which"
> become optional?  Or "traceroute"?  Don't even get me started on so-called
> "package managers").

That's a lot of why I run Slackware here pretty much exclusively.

(snip)
>   Chapter 14---I don't know anyone using NFS anymore (I think the last time
> I saw NFS in a commercial setting was the late 90s, and even at home, I
> don't use NFS all that much).  But replace NFS with Samba, and it's spot on
> (more or less).

I use it here.  Though I can't quite get all aspects of it to work the way I 
think it should be.  For some reason the server is refusing to export the 
first of three drives,  while it does okay with the other two.  And as far as 
I can tell all of the config stuff is pretty much identical.

>   -spc (Been using Unix since 1989 ... )

Linux here since 1999,  and some exposure to unix before that with a friend 
who ran it at home,  and gave me a login I could get to by way of a modem.  
I'm glad he did.  :-)

-- 
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space,  a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed.  --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James 
M Dakin