[TUHS] rebuilding the unix v5 man pages

Mark Longridge cubexyz at gmail.com
Mon Aug 11 02:36:03 AEST 2014


Since there's a pdf of the unix v5 man pages I figured I might as well
recreate all the necessary files to have man pages in v5.

There's a very simple thompson shell script that I used from v6 to create man:

if X$2 != X"" nroff man0/naa man$1/$2.$1
if X$2 = X"" nroff man0/naa man1/$1.1

I borrowed the assembly language source from v6 to recreate nroff for
v5. After that it was just a matter of matching the date from various
files in v4 and v6. If the date was exactly the same for a given man
page file I just copied it straight into v5. If the date was different
then I used the version in v6 and just edited it until it matched what
was shown in the v5 manual pdf.

It should also help me figure out a lot of the differences between v5
and v6. When it's all done I'll put the disk images and configuration
files on archive.org and post the URL here.

I developed a sort of philosophy for adding stuff to unix v5 which
goes beyond the  v5root.tar.gz files donated by Dennis Ritchie:

No changing of cc or as.
No changing of the kernel code beyond recompiling the existing v5 code.
No changing of the existing device drivers (adding new ones is OK).
No backporting of iolib or stdio into v5.
No changing libc.
Adding userland programs is OK as long as the above rules are followed.

Mark



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