[TUHS] Remember the ed thread?

[Larry McVoy]

That's an excellent book.  After that, try this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-UNIX-Programming-Marc-Rochkind/dp/0131411543

On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 11:37:57AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> Anders -- good for you.
> 
> That said, as one of those 'grey beards,' can I recommend that you stop,
> and go to a technical library or bookstore and find yourself a copy of Rob
> and Brian's wonderful book: "*The Unix Programming Environment*" (*a.k.a*
> "UPE" or ISBN 0-13-937699-2)  *then do the exercises*.  That book is still
> relevant today - a little secret, I give a copy of it and "*Advanced
> Programming in the Unix Environment*" (*a.k.a.* "APUE") to all my new
> engineers - even though they are all using 'Linux' for their work.  To
> those that object at first, I remind them, Linux is just the current and
> most popular implementation of the ideas from Ken, Dennis, Doug, and
> friends and I'm sure they will learn something from the time invested[1].
> 
> FWIW: Besides learning ed (which will help you unlock some of the mysteries
> of other UNIX tools like grep and sed), take a shot at looking at the
> introduction to nroff/troff (as has been discussed here - not to restart a
> war).  Learning to use a 'document compiler' like the troff family is never
> a bad investment.
> 
> Have fun,
> Clem
> 
> 
> 1.]  BTW I have yet had a young engineer that actually did try the
> exercises not come back and say something like "Wow, I never knew ...."   I
> don't gloat, but I smile inside, know that I just made them a more
> effective for our team.  If they ask, I point out I had been using UNIX and
> hacking on the kernel most every day for at least 10 years when it first
> appeared in the early 80's (84/85 I think), and I learned a few tricks when
> I read it.
> ???
> ???
> 
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 11:16 AM Anders Damsgaard <anders at adamsgaard.dk>
> wrote:
> 
> > * Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> [2021-03-29 07:34:49 -0700]:
> >
> > >I had *.clients.your-server.de crawling mcvoy.com in violation of my
> > >robots.txt.  For whatever reason, the tty settings (or something)
> > >made vi not work, I dunno what the deal is, stty -tabs didn't help.
> > >
> > >So I had to resort to ed to write and debug the little program below.
> > >It was surprisingly pleasant, it's probably the first time I've used ed
> > >for anything real in at least a decade.  My fingers still know it.
> > >
> > >+1 for ed.  It's how many decades old and still useful?
> >
> > I recently learned ed(1) for the first time (I have a unix beard, but it's
> > not grey yet). I found ed to be very efficient and useful for small fixes,
> > even on slow connections.  This beginner's tutorial was very helpful
> > for me: gopher://katolaz.net/0/ed_tutorial.txt
> >
> > (https mirror for non-gopher clients:
> > https://adamsgaard.dk/npub/ed_tutorial.txt )
> >

-- 
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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm