Unix Quote (was: Re: building a PDP11 from the things you

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Fri Aug 10 14:35:12 2001

It was thus said that the Great Carlos Murillo once stated:
>
> At 01:16 AM 8/10/01 -0400, you wrote:
> > -spc (And can you explain the insanely different command line parameters
> > to ls (typical Unix command line), find and dd? All three, I think
> > are POSIX to some degree 8-)
>
> Mhh, care to highlight a particularly nasty difference in ls? (dd I know).
> When in doubt, use sed. Except for a certain bug in the HPUX 10.20
> release, it behaves quite uniformly across the board.

  What I was trying to say is that `ls' uses single letter options preceeded
by a dash (-l -a -F), `find' uses full words with a dash (-print -follow)
and `dd' uses words/abreviations without dashes (if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null
count=45) and all three are found on every Unix system (at least, all the
ones I've used and I've used a fair number of them).

> I brought the issue of interoperability on board because I like to be able
> to use different unixes w/o too many different quirks; however, we
> started comparing DCL vs. Unix shells. Interoperability is a moot issue
> for DCL, of course. It is a higher standard that we're requiring
> of Unix. Perhaps we should stick to one flavor of Unix when making
> the comparisons? (I know, I'm taking a step back from my former position;
> you guys are too tough :-) ).

  I am talking about a single flavor of Unix 8-)

  -spc (Oh, then there's the GNU utilities which can also take full
        words preceeded by two dashes ... )
Received on Fri Aug 10 2001 - 14:35:12 BST