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Unix filesystem semantics history - files with holes

by Erik E. Fair

When did the Unix filesystem add the semantics for "files with holes" (large, sparse files)? Just an idle question that was sparked by a conversation I had today. Erik <fair(a)clock.org>

6 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Paper discussing Unix boot process?

by Pat Barron

The more I think about this, the more I'm sure I'm barking up the wrong tree... >From bits and pieces I've been able to recall, the thing I am looking for was not about Unix - it was about TOPS-20. It was a timeline of the system bootstrap activities from power-on to the point where users could log in. I still don't remember where I found it originally, but at least now I'm pretty sure I've been looking in all the wrong places... I believe it originated at CMU, but I don't know for sure that that's where I originally located it. The actual problem I'm trying to solve is, at this point in my professional career, I'm starting to interact with a lot of people (even experienced software developers) who just have no clue of what has to happen to get a computer from the point of "power-on" to the point where they can actually use it to do things. This makes me sad... So, I'm looking for something that I can point these people to that could clue them in... I think the whole bootstrap process is useful to understand for a lot of reasons, partly because it makes you think about all the little fiddly details that have to be attended to to make the computer do what you want - when I was first learning about this, I remember being particularly fascinated by what had to happen to prepare for that moment at which you turn on the MMU, to make sure that the system continues executing in a place you expect it to, in the right processor mode. I know most people that I interact with are using Linux or Windows on Intel-architecture machines, but the boot process for Unix on the PDP-10 or VAX (or even TOPS-20 on the PDP-10) I thought would be a much simpler thing to understand. Though maybe that's the wrong thought process, maybe I should just find something related to Linux that is comparable (even though I think it's more complicated). While searching, I also came across a decent presentation by a friend of mine who teaches at CMU, and discusses hardware that people probably actually work with right now, but I think it would be best consumed along with the actual lecture that it goes with. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410-f08/lectures/L20_Bootstrap.pdf Maybe I'll find what I was originally looking for at some point, but after spinning on this for most of the day, I don't think it's related to Unix... --Pat.

6 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 41, Issue 2

by Doug McIlroy

here

6 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] List ping

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

This thread brings to mind a wonderful saying which I just saw in another forum: "A wise man speaks when he feels he has something to say - a fool speaks when he feels he has to say something." And to reply in advance to the 'but I did't realize so many other people had sent in replies' - try scanning your emailbox before replying to messages to a large list. S/N is to be hallowed. Noel

6 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Does anybody have this book and can look for something for me?

by Pat Barron

This book can apparently be "borrowed" from the Internet Archive. I'm not sure how they do that, haven't tried to, I just see it says you need to log in to borrow the book for 14 days. https://archive.org/details/unixprimerplus00wait --Pat.

6 years, 1 month

Does anybody have this book and can look for something for me? - solved

by Jon Steinhart

Thanks to Pat, I looked at the book at the Internet Archive and it is there.

6 years, 1 month

Does anybody have this book and can look for something for me?

by Jon Steinhart

OK, something that's not a ping :-) I'm trying to track down the author of a cartoon that I'd like to use in my book so that I can try to get permission. Last one that I need! It's a cartoon that I only have on paper and don't know where it came from. It has two frames, then and now, the first with a bunch of cavemen grunting awk, grep, mkdir, yank, the second with a bunch of people sitting at computers uttering the same. I recently stumbled upon something that said that these were in a book called "UNIX Primer PLUS". Anybody have a copy of that? If so, can you please check to see if that's the original or whether they got it from somewhere else? Thanks, Jon

6 years, 1 month

List ping

by Warren Toomey

Just checking you are all still out there :-) Cheers, Warren

6 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] List ping

by Nemo Nusquam

On 04/10/19 09:59, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: > Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> On 10/04/2019, Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote: >>> Just checking you are all still out there :-) Cheers, Warren >> Well, this is not "Forever September"? #6-) I just finished reading a >> fascinating article on Inferno and was most amused by the comment in >> Rob Pike's biblio note at the end. N. > So, please share article link and comment with the list? Thanks, Arnold Apologies -- I found it here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6772868/ Bell Labs Tech. J., Vol. 2, Iss. 1, 1997 (or here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bltj.2028 but there must an open version available by now). Pike wrote: "He has never written a program that uses cursor addressing." N.

6 years, 1 month

Retaining file-modified timestamps

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

So, a while back I mentioned that I'd done tweaked versions of 'cp', 'mv', 'chmod' etc for V6 which retained the original modified date of a file (when the actual contents were not changed). I had some requests for those versions, which I have finally got around to checking and uploading (along with 'mvall', which for some reason V6 didn't have). I've added them to a couple of my V6 pages: http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/V6Unix.html#mvall http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/ImprovingV6.html#FileWrite Note (per the page) that the latter group all require the smdate() system call, which was commented out in 'vanilla' V6 (because using it confused the backup system); the page gives instructions on how to turn it back on. Noel

6 years, 1 month

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