The UNIX- HATERS Handbook

For Dummies ” series has over 7 million copies in print with translations in more than 20 … 1 Unix The World’s First Computer Virus “Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are … iv IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. An International Data Group Company San Mateo, California Indianapolis, Indiana Boston, Massachusetts The UNIX-HATERS Handbook Published by IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. An International Data Group Company 155 Bovet Road, Suite 310 San Mateo, CA 94402 Copyright ? 1994 by IDG Books Worldwide. All rights reserved. No part …

Neuhaus, who saw the project through to its completion. Amy Pedersen was our Imprint Manager. The UNIX-HATERS cover was illustrated by Ken Copfelt of The Stock Illustration Source. Typographical Conventions In this book, we use this roman font for most of the text and a different sans serif font for the horror stories from the UNIX-HATERS mailing list. We’ve tried to put command names, where they appear, in bold , and the names of Unix system functions in italics . There’s also a courier font used for computer output, and we make it bold for information typed by the user. That’s it. This isn’t an unreadable and obscure computer manual with ten different fonts in five different styles. We hate computer manuals that look like they were unearthed with the rest of King Tut’s sacred artifacts. This book was typeset without the aid of troff , eqn , pic , tbl , yuc , ick , or any other idiotic Unix acronym. In fact, it was typeset using FrameMaker on a Macintosh, a Windows box, and a NeXTstation….. Standardizing Unconformity 11 at NeXTWORLD asked me what the difference was between AIX and A/UX. “AIX is Unix from IBM. A/UX is Unix from Apple.” “What’s the difference?” he asked. “I’m not sure. They’re both AT&T System V with gratuitous changes. Then there’s HP-UX which is HP’s version of System V with gratuitous changes. DEC calls its system ULTRIX. DGUX is Data General’s. And don’t forget Xenix—that’s from SCO.” NeXT, meanwhile, calls their version of Unix (which is really Mach with brain-dead Unix wrapped around it) NEXTSTEP. But it’s impossible to get a definition of NEXTSTEP: is it the window system? Objective-C? The environment? Mach? What? Originally, many vendors wanted to use the word “Unix” to describe their products, but they were prevented from doing so by AT&T’s lawyers, who thought that the word “Unix” was some kind of valuable registered trademark. Vendors picked names like VENIX and ULTRIX to avoid the possibility of a lawsuit. These days, however, most vendors wouldn’t use the U-word if they had a choice. It isn’t that they’re trying to avoid a lawsuit: what they are really trying to do is draw a distinction between their new and improved Unix and all of the other versions of Unix that merely satisfy the industry standards. It’s hard to resist being tough on the vendors. After all, in one breath they say that they want to offer users and developers a common Unix environment. In the next breath, they say that they want to make their own trademarked version of Unix just a little bit better than their competitors: add a few more features, improve functionality, and provide better administrative tools, and you can jack up the price. Anybody who thinks that the truth lies somewhere in between is having the wool pulled over their eyes….