[TUHS] The most surprising Unix programs

Rob Pike robpike at gmail.com
Mon Mar 16 08:01:46 AEST 2020


Ha! Someone on hacker news, that fount of profundity, posted the C
code for typo and said that it would be a simple matter to update to
modern Unix.

I tried quite hard to do that years ago, and failed, which is why I
wrote my own version in Go. The original is just barely above
assembler and deeply dependent on CPU, operating system, compiler and
even linker. Hell, evidence shows it couldn't even be ported to v7.

It's hard for younger programmers to appreciate how different things once were.

-rob


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