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On Fri, May 5, 2023 at 11:01 AM Gordon Henderson <gordon+lug@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 1 May 2023, rds_met wrote:
>
> > Hi there
> >
> > I stumbled on this Wikipedia page
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
> > "Unix philosophy"
> >
> > while making some links explaining "awk" to the uninitiated.
> > It's good isn't it?!
>
> It was good... It started to get less good round about the mid 80s...
>
> Take the "Do one thing well" part...
>
> The 'ls' command used to just output the filenames, one per line and do
> nothing else.
>
> (It still does that if it recognises that output is not a terminal - try:
> ls | cat)
>
> So you wanted the filenames sorted?
>
> ls | sort
>
> Want them in columns?
>
> ls | sort | pr -4
>
> Paged:
>
> ls | sort | pr -4 | more
>
> and so on.
>
> Today, ls has been expanded, bloated, some may say, so it has all the
> options in one command. Less is more, as they said.
>
> Similarly some may remember searching the file system for files containing
> e.g. stdio.h with:
>
> find . -type t -name \*.c -exec fgrep stdio.h {} /dev/null \;
>
> or as we might work out what we do today is 'bloat' the grep command to do
> the recursive find and print the filename.. (fgrep -r -l stdio.h) and who
> cares about the filename filtering...
>
> And theres me using fgrep rather than grep as fgrep used to be faster. Oh
> well.
>
> But then we've paid for the faster cpu, faster IO and more memory, so
> might as well use it...
>
> My first Unix experience was in 1980 on a PDP-11/40 with 128KB of core
> memory. It was nice and due to the contraints we had to work like the
> above with piped small commands - I don't consider that time the "glory
> days" but I appreciate what we did with the contraints, but do I want to
> go back to it? Well for day to day use, no, not really.
>
> For hobby/fun use? Well... Yes which is why I've developed just such a
> system running on a 16-bit CPU... Although it's not Unix, nor C, but maybe
> a step back, so Multi-tasking, but single user and BCPL rather than C.
> What we do for a bit of retro fun...
>
> Gordon
Gordon, you need to write a book! Capture that knowledge.
Cheers roly (now in Scotland!)
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