DOS ain't dead

UNIX-ification / POSIX-ification / Linux-ification (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 14.11.2021, 19:15

I'm struggling with the omnipresent *nix ecosystem which rules the world. "All the world's a *nix!" They had some great ideas, but it feels like everything must be shoehorned (exclusively) into "*nix or die!" (Of course that's not true, just use Windows! Ugh.)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_commands

* https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Utilities-in-Makefiles.html
> awk cat cmp cp diff echo egrep expr false grep install-info ln ls
> mkdir mv printf pwd rm rmdir sed sleep sort tar test touch tr true

There are many third-party *nix-standard tools that can save time and effort (less bugs), even on lowly or obsolete platforms like DOS (our favorite): DJGPP FTW!

But, like I said, everything seems to be shoehorned into "*nix only!" The Wikipedia article for literate programming (e.g. Knuth's WEB for TeX/Metafont, originally in Pascal) says Knuth was rebuked for not using *nix tools to solve a certain task more simply. It lists his opponent using: tr, sort, uniq, sed, sh. (Disclaimer: McIlroy was the proponent of *nix pipelines and developed diff, sort, join, tr.)

It's weird because everything starts simple but gets progressively more complex. Diff originally outputted to Ed, Patch came later. Ed spun off both Grep and Sed. DOS even had Edlin as a "temporary" solution. Ed also evolved into Ex/Vi and Sam. TECO evolved into Emacs. AWK (very loosely speaking) evolved into Perl and other bigger, more complex, tools.

My opinion: use *nix tools if they can help, if you can download or port them yourself, otherwise write your own simpler replacements. But I don't think it's reasonable to require every system to have a "full POSIX suite" just to rebuild simple things!

Complete thread:

• UNIX-ification / POSIX-ification / Linux-ification - Rugxulo, 14.11.2021, 19:15 (Developers)
  • UNIX-ification / POSIX-ification / Linux-ification - rr, 14.11.2021, 21:55
  • UNIX-ification / POSIX-ification / Linux-ification - tkchia, 15.11.2021, 21:32
    • UNIX-ification / POSIX-ification / Linux-ification - Rugxulo, 20.11.2021, 22:39
      • UNIX-ification / POSIX-ification / Linux-ification - tkchia, 22.11.2021, 18:27
        • UNIX-ification / POSIX-ification / Linux-ification - RayeR, 22.11.2021, 18:49
          • UNIX-ification / POSIX-ification / Linux-ification - tkchia, 22.11.2021, 20:18
            • UNIX-ification / POSIX-ification / Linux-ification - RayeR, 23.11.2021, 05:04
  • UNIX-ification / POSIX-ification / Linux-ification - tkchia, 15.11.2021, 22:24