From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2017 08:18:27 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] UNIX of choice these days? In-Reply-To: References: <1506341239.18395.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: <20170925151827.GP28606@mcvoy.com> On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 10:16:11AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > So what I'm asking us to try to do, is not just look at the technology in a > vacuum. Why was it not interesting to /proc for BSD. Clearly, Linux > added it (differently than Eighth Edition of course and the 4.4 > implementation was much more like V8 that Linux would settle). People did > do the work to use it. Linux's /proc was hugely different than the AT&T /proc, in a good way in my opinion. It's sort of Tcl like :-), everything is a string. So you can look at the files with cat. I think plan 9 went this way as well. And the Linux /proc did and does so much more than AT&T /proc. You can tune the system, debug the system, here's an example. You know something is holding something open, you want to know what. $ ps PID TTY TIME CMD 2668 pts/8 00:00:00 bash 14153 pts/8 00:00:00 ps $ cd /proc/2668/fd $ ls -l total 0 lrwx------ 1 lm lm 64 Sep 23 21:16 0 -> /dev/pts/8 lrwx------ 1 lm lm 64 Sep 23 21:16 1 -> /dev/pts/8 lrwx------ 1 lm lm 64 Sep 23 21:16 2 -> /dev/pts/8 lrwx------ 1 lm lm 64 Sep 23 21:39 255 -> /dev/pts/8 Now isn't that pleasant? (Yes, I know about lsof). One could make an argument that for debugging you need a lighter weight way to get the info, and maybe ptrace is lighter, I dunno. But for most stuff the Linux /proc (it's really /system because it's about way way more than processes) is super pleasant. > So why did *BSD not bring those versions of the utilities back? > > My >>guess<< while they had added some things (like /proc) it was different > again and we got into the BSD != Linux stuff - which has been the UNIX war > all over again. Yeah, I don't see the two being compat. They could overlap but when you get into specific tuning variables they won't match. I suspect that no /proc in BSD is simple, there wasn't anyone who wanted to put in the time to evolve it and maintain it.