The Unix Haters' Handbook

[woodelf]

John Floren wrote:

> No news is good news. Sure, you could make grep blather all over
> stderr or something, but why? If you don't get any errors, the program
> completed correctly. If you screwed up the syntax or specified a
> nonexistent file, you get an error.
> However, since GNU tools are so utterly goddamn broken, this may or
> may not be the case on any given tool. Try Plan 9 some time and you'll
> have a lovely experience... for example, see
> http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/cat for the proper way to
> implement cat.

I have been sick for the last few weeks, so I have been off this list for
a while.  My view is unix  on the 11 still is the best because the tools worked
as a system rather than being a copy of copy ... of the original.
I have PDP-8 clone and figuring how to get kermit from a Dos laptop
to the machine over the serial link is more important to me than 'the best version of cat'.
Lets talk about non-broken tools so that we can run the old machines properly
like a terminal emulator that works like a real terminal?
Linux to my knowlage has none. My only gripe about the UNIX mind set is that
they did not have a small screen editor.