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Ask Unix Co-Creator Rob Pike
Today we return to our Slashdot interview roots with a "Call for questions" for Rob "Commander" Pike, who has been involved in the development of many modern programming concepts, GUI advances, character sets, and operating systems. We'll email 10 - 12 of the highest-moderated questions to Rob and post his answers as soon as he gets them back to us.
Actually there is a funny answer to this question on the plan9 man pages. typing man emacs you get something that only says : see acme
acme is a really powerfull and interesting concept in term of editor. (you can get it on unix either using the spinoff called wily, or better by downloading the complete plan9port for unix)
Rob also wrote another great editor called sam (available on both unix and windows). Very nice to use, my favorite editor on windows.
the main characteritic of those 2 is innovation. I really think people should give them a try just to see that there is something else out there.
The man is a great original thinker.
a.c.
Jeez, someone, click on the fuckin link in the post with his name. He's not a Unix co-creator. He worked a lot on Plan 9, and wrote a bitmap windowing system for Unix. But he's not a Unix co-creator. The creators of Unix are Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.
The operating systems link goes to encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com, which is a scam-site that steals articles from other sites, in this case from Wikipedia. The only thing they've added are ads. The original can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9
He also worked on Version 8 Unix and (IIRC) came up with an early version of the /proc filesystem.
He's certainly a co-creator of what we now know as Unix.
-- Alastair
Wikipedia article about Rob Pike...
14 letter. Each directory entry was 16 bytes -- 2 bytes for inode, 14 for filename.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
I think that he and the Bell Labs folks already answered those questions over 10 years ago:
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html
(See specially the first section: Motivation)
uriel
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
grep works quite nicely with utf8. even an ancient version of grep. as long as it's 8-bit clean and you give it search queries in the same encoding as your file. (like 8859-1 for 8859-1 files, utf8 for utf8 files).
The whole idea of utf8 is to have the least impact on existing software. There are encoding sets that do break text editors and grep. Like some of the asian multibyte encodings.
if you grep for a utf8 sequence in a binary file it will work exactly the same as if you grep for a latin1 sequence in a binary file or a US ASCII.
Some problems with utf8 are that strlen() can no longer be used to determine how many monospaced positions a string will fill. you have to use mblen() which requires you to know the lenght of your multibyte string. (multibyte strings don't have to be null terminated in all encoding systems, utf8 happens to support it, but mblen() isn't interested in that).
binary and text files are still the same on *nix. you can't have a newline as part of a utf8 multibyte sequence for example. fgets() works on utf8 the same as it always has. The following code will work with usascii, utf8 and iso-8859-x. the code obviously is unaware of the encoding scheme, but the important parts are the same in at least thoses encodings for it to work.
#include
int main() {
char buf[1024];
while(fgets(buf,sizeof buf,stdin)) {
fputs(buf, stdout);
}
return 0;
}
ps- if you want to grep binary files I would recommend piping the binary though the "strings" command first. it can yield better results. You can specify -e if you want "strings" to sniff out alternate encoding types. (including utf16)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Actually, the refuse to umount if there are users in the mount is part of the POSIX or SUS specifications.
Linux does not have a problem with it. That's why it has the -l option.
-l Lazy unmount. Detach the filesystem from the filesystem hierarchy now, and cleanup all references to the filesystem as soon as it is not busy anymore. (Requires kernel 2.4.11 or later.)
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
Rob, The media and UNIX/Linux boosters have been developing/promoting UNIX variants as a competitor to MS desktop OS's. Are UNIX and it's variants destined to have a significant share of the commercial desktop, or is it a compromise and will always be a small share (but doing most of the work!) OS compared to the star-studded MS lineup? What further steps do OS developers have to take to bring it to every desktop?
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs back 123456789
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