[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Doug McIlroy]

With Steve's eloquent grump and cat -v on the table, I can't
help re-citing the peerless cardinal sin of
        less --help | wc

Doug

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 2 May 2017, Doug McIlroy wrote:

> With Steve's eloquent grump and cat -v on the table, I can't help 
> re-citing the peerless cardinal sin of
>         less --help | wc

Speaking of "cat", what really drives me nuts is "cat file | cmd"...

What's wrong with "cmd < file" (or to really confuse newbies, "< file 
cmd")?

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 8:59 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 2 May 2017, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> > With Steve's eloquent grump and cat -v on the table, I can't help
> > re-citing the peerless cardinal sin of
> >         less --help | wc
>
> Speaking of "cat", what really drives me nuts is "cat file | cmd"...
>
> What's wrong with "cmd < file" (or to really confuse newbies, "< file
> cmd")?


Ooo! Ooo! Ooo! I've actually got something for this....

First of all, there's nothing strictly speaking *wrong* with 'cmd < file'
and cat 'cat file | cmd' is definitely overused, often unintentionally and
out of ignorance.

However, 'cmd <file' requires 'file' as a literal string in the command;
`cat` can be useful when the file parameter may be optional. E.g., 'cat
"$@" | ...'. Now some folks will immediately respond by saying, "many
commands will read from stdin if a filename is not presented on the command
line, so why not, 'cmd "$@"'?" And that's certainly a valid question, to
which I would answer that the semantics of a command sometimes subtly
change when presented with one or more filenames as argument (e.g. 'grep'),
so using `cat` may suppress that behavior if desired. "But `grep` has the
`-h` option to tell it not to print the filename!" Yes, but `grep` is just
*one command* and not *all* of them do. The point being that 'cat' in a
pipeline has it's place, even if that place is rarely the place we see it.

Another, related use to cover up one of the more odious of recent design
decisions in Unix-like systems is to use `cat` at the *end* of the
pipeline. Some programs change behavior if they know that they are writing
into a tty; one can suppress that if one terminates the pipeline in `cat`.
This is surely a case of mis-using a feature to mask a bug, but it's often
useful regardless.

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Arthur Krewat]

Not to mention, you can cat multiple files - as in concatenate :)

On 5/3/2017 8:54 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 8:59 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org 
> <mailto:dave at horsfall.org>> wrote:
>
>     On Tue, 2 May 2017, Doug McIlroy wrote:
>     > With Steve's eloquent grump and cat -v on the table, I can't help
>     > re-citing the peerless cardinal sin of
>     >         less --help | wc
>
>     Speaking of "cat", what really drives me nuts is "cat file | cmd"...
>
>     What's wrong with "cmd < file" (or to really confuse newbies, "< file
>     cmd")?
>
>
> Ooo! Ooo! Ooo! I've actually got something for this....
>
> First of all, there's nothing strictly speaking *wrong* with 'cmd < 
> file' and cat 'cat file | cmd' is definitely overused, often 
> unintentionally and out of ignorance.
>
> However, 'cmd <file' requires 'file' as a literal string in the 
> command; `cat` can be useful when the file parameter may be optional. 
> E.g., 'cat "$@" | ...'. Now some folks will immediately respond by 
> saying, "many commands will read from stdin if a filename is not 
> presented on the command line, so why not, 'cmd "$@"'?" And that's 
> certainly a valid question, to which I would answer that the semantics 
> of a command sometimes subtly change when presented with one or more 
> filenames as argument (e.g. 'grep'), so using `cat` may suppress that 
> behavior if desired. "But `grep` has the `-h` option to tell it not to 
> print the filename!" Yes, but `grep` is just *one command* and not 
> *all* of them do. The point being that 'cat' in a pipeline has it's 
> place, even if that place is rarely the place we see it.
>
> Another, related use to cover up one of the more odious of recent 
> design decisions in Unix-like systems is to use `cat` at the *end* of 
> the pipeline. Some programs change behavior if they know that they are 
> writing into a tty; one can suppress that if one terminates the 
> pipeline in `cat`. This is surely a case of mis-using a feature to 
> mask a bug, but it's often useful regardless.
>
>         - Dan C.
>

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Michael Kjörling]

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On 3 May 2017 10:59 +1000, from dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall):
> What's wrong with "cmd < file" (or to really confuse newbies, "< file 
> cmd")?

If you want to _really_ confuse a newbie, stick an "<file" or ">file"
_in the middle of_ a long command, and watch hilarity ensue.

Or the "<sth>" that someone here mentioned, if you are so inclined...

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
                 “People who think they know everything really annoy
                 those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Clem Cole]

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below...


On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 8:59 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 2 May 2017, Doug McIlroy wrote:
>
> > With Steve's eloquent grump and cat -v on the table, I can't help
> > re-citing the peerless cardinal sin of
> >         less --help | wc
>

To Doug -- touché




> Speaking of "cat", what really drives me nuts is "cat file | cmd"...
>
> What's wrong with "cmd < file" (or to really confuse newbies, "< file
> cmd")?


Not to be argumentative, but Dave, please be careful.  I agree that
idiom is misused, but there are times when I think it is appropriate, which
is one of the reason why I love the Unix guiding principle of not "forcing"
the user to do one thing or another because we know better, but letting
education and good 'taste' be the guide.

​I think Justice Potter Stewart describe​d pornography of knowing it when
he sees it.  IMO: there are time when using cat is in better taste that a
file redirection.  For instance, I can think of a few examples when I need
to direct input from multiple files, using a more complex 'wye' style pipe
line or a redirection from backward quotes, that the cat foo sequence seems
like its easier to understand/debug.  [Maybe it shows my inner
schizophrenia and heard voices from multiple places that I kinda like the
'wye' command].

Clem
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[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[arnold]

> [Maybe it shows my inner
> schizophrenia and heard voices from multiple places that I kinda like the
> 'wye' command].

Um, what is the 'wye' command? Never heard of it...

Thanks,

Arnold

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Clem Cole]

Early line at time version of paste

On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 11:34 AM, <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:

> > [Maybe it shows my inner
> > schizophrenia and heard voices from multiple places that I kinda like the
> > 'wye' command].
>
> Um, what is the 'wye' command? Never heard of it...
>
> Thanks,
>
> Arnold
>
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[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[A. P. Garcia]

On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 9:01 AM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 4, 2017, at 19:14, Larry McVoy wrote:
>> On Thu, May 04, 2017 at 03:59:22PM +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
>> > On 3 May 2017, at 14:41, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > >
>> > > Along these lines, who said "Cat went to Berkely, came back waving flags."
>> >
>> > And anyone who lived through the SunOS 4 -- SunOS 5 transition will know that some of those Berkeley flags (not specifically for cat, but almost certainly including those for cat) were really quite useful.  I remember spending really a long time finding and building BSD/GNU versions of utilities which actually had the options you needed on early SunOS 5 machines: later on Sun themselves put some of them back.
>
> I mean, there's a legitimate argument that some of them would have been
> just as useful or more as separate utilities than as flags. But to some
> extent the fully generalized version seems questionable.
>
> I mean, to apply the design philosophy to, say, ls -t (nevermind that
> this particular flag has in fact existed since Unix V1, it's exactly the
> *kind* of thing that should prompt someone who is consistently applying
> Pike's idea of the unix philosophy to say "sorting should be the sort
> tool"), you would have to have A) a basic "ls" command which does all
> the filesystem-accessing work and prints timestamps and all other
> relevant output in a format that can be sorted lexicographically, B) run
> it through sort(1), C) a command [or maybe an awk script] that will pare
> it back down to the usual human-readable formats (names only, ls -l, or
> maybe a timestamp-and-name format, with human-friendly timestamps). And
> then D) another tool to sort it into columns.

have you been using powershell lately? it makes things like this
rather enjoyable. yes, powershell is open source, and yes, it's been
ported to linux, but i think unix needs its own home-grown "object
oriented shell".


<snip>

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Tim Bradshaw]

I asked my wife (who is a longer-term Sun person than me and also went through this) if my memory was correct (I now keep elaborate and deeply unpublishable notes but I didn't then) and she immediately said 'echo -n': this was presumably either in /(usr/)?bin/echo in BSD/SunOS 4 or in the /bin/sh builtin, and not in the versions for SunOS 5 with resulting horrible failures of scripts all over the place.

I think I can sort of see why the serious-standards-compliance-even-when-the-standard-is-horrible thing might have seemed like it would appeal to the kind of organisations Sun wanted to sell to (ones where people wear suits), but it also drove their traditional userbase to Linux/*BSD and this did not help them in the long term.  (Also: do the standards say 'thou shall have no other options but these', because if they do they are terrible standards).

> On 5 May 2017, at 00:14, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, May 04, 2017 at 03:59:22PM +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
>>> On 3 May 2017, at 14:41, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Along these lines, who said "Cat went to Berkely, came back waving flags."
>> 
>> And anyone who lived through the SunOS 4 -- SunOS 5 transition will know that some of those Berkeley flags (not specifically for cat, but almost certainly including those for cat) were really quite useful.  I remember spending really a long time finding and building BSD/GNU versions of utilities which actually had the options you needed on early SunOS 5 machines: later on Sun themselves put some of them back.
> 
> As someone who was at Sun, loved SunOS 4 and hated Solaris, yup.  Even the
> diehard Solaris people like Bryan Cantrill say that they stick /opt/gnu/bin
> in their path first.
> 
> It boggles my mind that Sun was so strict on being compat with SVR4 and
> they knew that everyone hated that.
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy                     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Random832]

On Thu, May 4, 2017, at 19:14, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Thu, May 04, 2017 at 03:59:22PM +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
> > On 3 May 2017, at 14:41, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > Along these lines, who said "Cat went to Berkely, came back waving flags."
> > 
> > And anyone who lived through the SunOS 4 -- SunOS 5 transition will know that some of those Berkeley flags (not specifically for cat, but almost certainly including those for cat) were really quite useful.  I remember spending really a long time finding and building BSD/GNU versions of utilities which actually had the options you needed on early SunOS 5 machines: later on Sun themselves put some of them back.

I mean, there's a legitimate argument that some of them would have been
just as useful or more as separate utilities than as flags. But to some
extent the fully generalized version seems questionable.

I mean, to apply the design philosophy to, say, ls -t (nevermind that
this particular flag has in fact existed since Unix V1, it's exactly the
*kind* of thing that should prompt someone who is consistently applying
Pike's idea of the unix philosophy to say "sorting should be the sort
tool"), you would have to have A) a basic "ls" command which does all
the filesystem-accessing work and prints timestamps and all other
relevant output in a format that can be sorted lexicographically, B) run
it through sort(1), C) a command [or maybe an awk script] that will pare
it back down to the usual human-readable formats (names only, ls -l, or
maybe a timestamp-and-name format, with human-friendly timestamps). And
then D) another tool to sort it into columns.

And you'd have to type in all of those every time you want a directory
listing, or maybe have it packaged up in a script (which would then need
a name, and unique names for every combination of behaviors you might
want to use).

At that point, who gets to decide that ls -t is useful enough to be
"proper unix" but cat -v is "some ridiculous idea from berkeley"?



Anyway, on the original subject of unlimited symbol name and filename
lengths - ultimately there's a tradeoff - your symbols or filenames
probably don't have to get very large before it makes more sense to use
a variable-length format to save space, and the smallest reasonable
limit for a variable-length format is 255.

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, May 04, 2017 at 03:59:22PM +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
> On 3 May 2017, at 14:41, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Along these lines, who said "Cat went to Berkely, came back waving flags."
> 
> And anyone who lived through the SunOS 4 -- SunOS 5 transition will know that some of those Berkeley flags (not specifically for cat, but almost certainly including those for cat) were really quite useful.  I remember spending really a long time finding and building BSD/GNU versions of utilities which actually had the options you needed on early SunOS 5 machines: later on Sun themselves put some of them back.

As someone who was at Sun, loved SunOS 4 and hated Solaris, yup.  Even the
diehard Solaris people like Bryan Cantrill say that they stick /opt/gnu/bin
in their path first.

It boggles my mind that Sun was so strict on being compat with SVR4 and
they knew that everyone hated that.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 3 May 2017, at 14:41, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Along these lines, who said "Cat went to Berkely, came back waving flags."

And anyone who lived through the SunOS 4 -- SunOS 5 transition will know that some of those Berkeley flags (not specifically for cat, but almost certainly including those for cat) were really quite useful.  I remember spending really a long time finding and building BSD/GNU versions of utilities which actually had the options you needed on early SunOS 5 machines: later on Sun themselves put some of them back.

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 3 May 2017, Nemo wrote:

> Along these lines, who said "Cat went to Berkely, came back waving 
> flags."

How did the expression go?  LSD and BSD were both produced at Berkeley; 
this is thought not to be a coincidence.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Nemo]

On 3 May 2017 at 09:09, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:
> Not to mention, you can cat multiple files - as in concatenate :)

Along these lines, who said "Cat went to Berkely, came back waving flags."

N.

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Andy Kosela]

On Tuesday, May 2, 2017, Diomidis Spinellis <dds at aueb.gr> wrote:

> On 02/05/2017 19:11, Steve Johnson wrote:
>
>> I recall a paper Dennis wrote (maybe more like a note) that was titled
>>      echo -c considered harmful
>> (I think it was -c).   It decried the tendency, now completely out of
>> control, for everybody and their dog to piddle on perfectly good code
>> just because it's "open".
>>
>
> There's definitely Rob Pike's talk "UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered
> Harmful", which he delivered at the 1983 Usenix Association Conference and
> Software Tools USers Group Summer Conference.  Unfortunately, I can't find
> it online.  It's interesting that the talk's date is now closer to the
> birth of Unix than to the present.
>
>
This talk is today as legendary as Plato's "On the Good" lecture[1].

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/4182081

--Andy
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[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Steve Johnson]

Thanks for the correction -- that is indeed the paper I was thinking
of...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From: "Diomidis Spinellis" <dds@aueb.gr>
To:"Steve Johnson" <scj at yaccman.com>, "Toby Thain"
<toby at telegraphics.com.au>, <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
Cc:
Sent:Tue, 2 May 2017 23:28:25 +0300
Subject:Re: [TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

 On 02/05/2017 19:11, Steve Johnson wrote:
 > I recall a paper Dennis wrote (maybe more like a note) that was
titled
 > echo -c considered harmful
 > (I think it was -c). It decried the tendency, now completely out of
 > control, for everybody and their dog to piddle on perfectly good
code
 > just because it's "open".

 There's definitely Rob Pike's talk "UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered 
 Harmful", which he delivered at the 1983 Usenix Association
Conference 
 and Software Tools USers Group Summer Conference. Unfortunately, I 
 can't find it online. It's interesting that the talk's date is now 
 closer to the birth of Unix than to the present.

 Diomidis

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[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Daniel Camolês]

There you go:
http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/

Em 2 de mai de 2017 17:29, "Diomidis Spinellis" <dds at aueb.gr> escreveu:

On 02/05/2017 19:11, Steve Johnson wrote:

> I recall a paper Dennis wrote (maybe more like a note) that was titled
>      echo -c considered harmful
> (I think it was -c).   It decried the tendency, now completely out of
> control, for everybody and their dog to piddle on perfectly good code
> just because it's "open".
>

There's definitely Rob Pike's talk "UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered
Harmful", which he delivered at the 1983 Usenix Association Conference and
Software Tools USers Group Summer Conference.  Unfortunately, I can't find
it online.  It's interesting that the talk's date is now closer to the
birth of Unix than to the present.

Diomidis
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[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Diomidis Spinellis]

On 02/05/2017 19:11, Steve Johnson wrote:
> I recall a paper Dennis wrote (maybe more like a note) that was titled
>      echo -c considered harmful
> (I think it was -c).   It decried the tendency, now completely out of
> control, for everybody and their dog to piddle on perfectly good code
> just because it's "open".

There's definitely Rob Pike's talk "UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered 
Harmful", which he delivered at the 1983 Usenix Association Conference 
and Software Tools USers Group Summer Conference.  Unfortunately, I 
can't find it online.  It's interesting that the talk's date is now 
closer to the birth of Unix than to the present.

Diomidis

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[ron minnich]

well, my memory is dmr. But it was a long time ago ...

On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 9:39 AM Erik E. Fair <fair-tuhs at netbsd.org> wrote:

> There is also Rob Pike's USENIX paper "UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered
> Harmful"
>
> http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/
>
> which definitely called out UCB CSRG "sins" in the view of Pike &
> Kernighan. Perhaps this is what you're thinking of?
>
>         Erik Fair
>
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[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Erik E. Fair]

There is also Rob Pike's USENIX paper "UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful"

http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/

which definitely called out UCB CSRG "sins" in the view of Pike & Kernighan. Perhaps this is what you're thinking of?

	Erik Fair

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Steve Johnson]

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I recall a paper Dennis wrote (maybe more like a note) that was titled
     echo -c considered harmful
(I think it was -c).   It decried the tendency, now completely out
of control, for everybody and their dog to piddle on perfectly good
code just because it's "open". 

Let's face it, programming languages today are more like shells --
they rise or fall on the quality of their libraries, and the
expression of algorithms (or even simplicity or efficiency) are
secondary.  And operating systems seem to exist mainly to host window
systems that vie for how deeply and obscurely they can hide vital
options, and pride themselves that striking any key at any time, no
matter how inadvertent, will cause some unexpected and unwanted
action.

I'm reminded of a friend of mine who took a math course, and said that
the professor "proved theorems by induction on the number of lemmas".

And yes, I'm sounding like a grumpy old fart this morning...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From: "Toby Thain" <toby@telegraphics.com.au>
To:<tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
Cc:
Sent:Mon, 1 May 2017 14:09:07 -0400
Subject:Re: [TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

 On 2017-05-01 1:25 PM, ron minnich wrote:
 > OK, I recall a note dmr wrote probably in the late 70s/early 80s
when
 > folks at UCB had (iirc) extended the symbol name size in C programs
to
 > essentially unlimited. This followed on (iirc) file names going
beyond
 > 14 characters.
 >
 > The rough outline was that dmr was calling out the revisions for
being
 > too general, and the phrase "BSD sins" sticks in my head (sins as a
verb).
 >
 > I'm reminded of this by something that happened with some interns
 > recently, as they wanted to make something immensely complex to
cover a
 > case that basically never happened. I was trying to point out that
you
 > can go overboard on that sort of thing, and it would have been nice
to
 > have such a quote handy -- anyone else remember it?

 Not what you're looking for, but in recent times we'd just say YAGNI
- 
 You Ain't Gonna Need It.

 --T

 >
 > ron


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[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[Toby Thain]

On 2017-05-01 1:25 PM, ron minnich wrote:
> OK, I recall a note dmr wrote probably in the late 70s/early 80s when
> folks at UCB had (iirc) extended the symbol name size in C programs to
> essentially unlimited. This followed on (iirc) file names going beyond
> 14 characters.
>
> The rough outline was that dmr was calling out the revisions for being
> too general, and the phrase "BSD sins" sticks in my head (sins as a verb).
>
> I'm reminded of this by something that happened with some interns
> recently, as they wanted to make something immensely complex to cover a
> case that basically never happened. I was trying to point out that you
> can go overboard on that sort of thing, and it would have been nice to
> have such a quote handy -- anyone else remember it?

Not what you're looking for, but in recent times we'd just say YAGNI - 
You Ain't Gonna Need It.

--T

>
> ron

[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[ron minnich]

OK, I recall a note dmr wrote probably in the late 70s/early 80s when folks
at UCB had (iirc) extended the symbol name size in C programs to
essentially unlimited. This followed on (iirc) file names going beyond 14
characters.

The rough outline was that dmr was calling out the revisions for being too
general, and the phrase "BSD sins" sticks in my head (sins as a verb).

I'm reminded of this by something that happened with some interns recently,
as they wanted to make something immensely complex to cover a case that
basically never happened. I was trying to point out that you can go
overboard on that sort of thing, and it would have been nice to have such a
quote handy -- anyone else remember it?

ron
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