#REDIRECT Unix
Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of ATT Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T, several other commercial vendors, as well as several non-profit organizations. UNIX was designed to be portability, computer multitasking and multi-user. The Unix systems are characterized by various concepts: plain text files, command line interpreter, hierarchical file system, etc. In software engineering, Unix is mainly noted for its use of the C programming language and the so-called Unix philosophy. The present owner of the UNIX trademark is The Open Group, while the present claimants on the rights to the UNIX source code are The SCO Group and Novell. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as "UNIX" (others are called "UNIX system-like" or Unix-like). ==History== ===1960s and 1970s=== In the 1960s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric worked on an experimental operating system called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), which was designed to run on the GE-645 mainframe computer. The aim was the creation of an interactive operating system with many novel capabilities, including enhanced security. The project did develop production releases, but initially these releases turned out to have poor performance. AT&T Bell Labs pulled out and deployed its resources elsewhere. One of the developers on the Bell Labs team, Ken Thompson, continued to develop for the GE-645 mainframe, and wrote a game for that computer called Space Travel. However, he found that the game was slow on the GE machine and was costly, apparently costing $75 per go in scarce computing time. Thompson thus re-wrote the game in Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-7 assembly_language with help from Dennis Ritchie. This experience, combined with his work on the Multics project, led Thompson to start a new operating system for the DEC PDP-7. Thompson and Ritchie led a team of developers, including Rudd Canaday, at Bell Labs developing a file system as well as the new multi-tasking operating system itself. They included a Command line interpreter and some small utility programs as well. This project was called UNICS, short for Uniplexed Information and Computing System, and could support two simultaneous users. The name has been attributed to Brian Kernighan, and was a Hack (technology slang) on ''Multics''. Following bad puns of UNICS (homophone of eunuchs) being a castrated MULTICS, the name was later changed to UNIX, and thus a legacy was born. The name is also a criticism of the overly general and bloated MULTICS system - UNIX would do one thing, and do it well. Up until this point there had been no financial support from Bell Labs, when the Computer Science Research Group wanted to use UNIX on a much larger machine than the PDP-7. Thompson and Ritchie managed to trade the promise of adding text processing capabilities to UNIX for a PDP-11/20 machine, and this itself led to some financial support from Bell. For the first time in 1970, the UNIX Operating System was officially named and ran on the PDP-11/20. It added a text formatting program called roff and a text editor. All three were written in PDP-11/20 assembly language. This initial "text processing system", made up of UNIX, roff, and the editor, was used by Bell Labs for text processing of patent applications at Bell. Runoff soon evolved into troff, the first electronic publishing program with a full typesetting capability. The ''UNIX Programmer's Manual'' was published on November 3, 1971. In 1973, the decision was made to re-write UNIX in the C programming language. The change meant that UNIX could later easily be modified to work on other machines (thus becoming portable), and other variations could be created by other developers. The code was now more concise and compact, leading to an acceleration in the development of UNIX. AT&T made UNIX available to universities and commercial firms, as well as the United States government under licenses. The licenses included all source code except for the machine-dependent kernel, which was written in PDP-11 assembly code. However, bootleg copies of the annotated UNIX machine-dependent kernel circulated widely in the late 1970's. Development expanded, with Versions 4, 5 and 6 being released by 1975. These versions added Pipe_(Unix)s, leading to the development of a more modular code-base, increasing development speed still further. By 1978, over 600 machines were running UNIX in some form. Version 7, the last version of Research UNIX to be released widely, was released in 1979. Versions 8, 9 and 10 were developed through the 1980s but were only ever released to a few universities, though they did generate papers describing the new work. This research led to the development of Plan 9 (operating system), a new portable distributed system. ===1980s=== AT&T now developed UNIX System III, based on Version 7, as a commercial version and sold the product directly, the first version launching in 1982. However its subsidiary, Western Electric, continued to sell older UNIX versions, based on the UNIX System (Versions 1 to 7). To end the confusion between all the differing versions, AT&T combined various versions developed at other universities and companies into UNIX System V Release 1. This introduced features such as the vi editor and curses (programming library) from the Berkeley Software Distribution of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). This also included support for the DEC VAX machine. The new commercial UNIX releases however no longer included the source code and so UCB continued to develop BSD UNIX as an alternative to UNIX System III and V, originally on the PDP-11 architecture (the BSD 2.x releases, ending with 2.10). Perhaps the most important aspect of the BSD development effort was the addition of TCP/IP Computer network code to the mainstream UNIX Kernel (computer science). The BSD effort produced eight significant releases that contained network code: 4.1c, 4.2, 4.3, 4.3-Tahoe ("Tahoe" being the nickname of the CCI Power 6/32 architecture that was the first non-DEC port of the BSD kernel), 4.3-Reno (to match the "Tahoe" naming, and that the release was something of a gamble), Net2, 4.4, and 4.4-lite. The network code found in these releases is the ancestor of almost all TCP/IP network code in use today, including code that was later released in AT&T System V UNIX and Microsoft Windows. Other companies began to offer commercial versions of the UNIX System for their own mini-computers and workstations. Most of these new UNIX flavors were developed from the System V base under a license from AT&T. Others chose BSD instead. One of the leading developers of BSD, Bill Joy, went on to co-found Sun Microsystems in 1982 and create SunOS (now Solaris) for their workstation computers. In 1980, Microsoft announced its first UNIX for 16-bit microcomputers called Xenix, which the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) ported to the Intel 8086 processor in 1983, and eventually branched Xenix into SCO UNIX in 1989. In 1984, an industry group called X/Open was formed, with the aim of forming compatible open systems, that is, standardize the UNIX systems. AT&T added various features into UNIX System V, such as file locking, system administration, job control (modelled on Incompatible Time Sharing), standard streams, the Remote File System and Transport Layer Interface. AT&T cooperated with Sun Microsystems and between 1987 and 1989 merged Xenix, BSD, SunOS, and System V into System V Release 4 (SVR4), independently of X/Open. This new release consolidated all the previous features into one package, and threatened the end of competing versions. It also greatly increased licensing fees. ===1990s=== In 1990, the Open Software Foundation released OSF/1, their standard Unix implementation, and it was more closely based on BSD than on SVR4. OSF was started in 1988 and funded by several Unix-related companies that wished to counteract AT&T's and Sun's collaboration on SVR4. AT&T and another group of licensees then proceeded to form the group "UNIX International" inorder to counteract OSF. This escalation of conflict between competing vendors gave rise to the syntagma "Unix wars". In 1991, a group of BSD developers (Donn Seeley, Mike Karels, Bill Jolitz, and Trent Hein) left the University of California to found Berkeley Software Design, Inc (BSDI). BSDI was the first company to produce a fully-functional commercial version of BSD UNIX for the inexpensive and ubiquitous Intel platform, which started a wave of interest in the use of inexpensive hardware for production computing. Shortly after it was founded, Bill Jolitz left BSDI to pursue distribution of 386BSD, commonly identified as the free software ancestor of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. By 1993 most of the commercial vendors of UNIX had changed their commercial variants of UNIX to be based upon System V Release 4, and many BSD features were added on top. In 1994, OSF stopped the development of OSF/1, as the only vendor using it was Digital Equipment Corporation, who branded it Digital UNIX. Shortly after UNIX System V Release 4 was produced, AT&T sold all its rights to UNIX to Novell. Dennis Ritchie, one of the creators of UNIX, likened this to the Biblical story of Esau selling his birthright for some lentils [http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=7379%40ucsbcsl.ucsb.edu&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Ddennis%2Britchie%2Blentil%2Bbirthright%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D7379%2540ucsbcsl.ucsb.edu%26rnum%3D1]. Novell developed its own version, UnixWare, merging its Netware with UNIX System V Release 4. Novell tried to use this to battle against Windows NT, but their core markets suffered considerably. In 1994, Novell decided to split the bundle of UNIX-related assets and sell parts of them. The UNIX trademark and the certification rights were sold to the X/Open Consortium. In 1996, X/Open merged with Open Software Foundation, creating the Open Group. Various standards by the Open Group now define what is and what is not a "UNIX" operating system, notably the post-1998 Single UNIX Specification. In 1995, the business of administration and support of the existing UNIX licenses plus rights to further develop the SystemV code base were transferred to the Santa Cruz Operation. Whether Novell also sold the copyrights is currently the subject of litigation (see below). ===2000s=== In 2000, the Santa Cruz Operation sold its entire UNIX business and assets to Caldera Systems, which later on changed its name to The SCO Group. This new player then started SCO-Linux controversies against various users and vendors of Linux. The SCO Group has offered various legal theories over the course of several cases. Some of these allege that Linux contains copyrighted Unix code now owned by The SCO Group. Others allege trade-secret violations by IBM, or contract violations by former Santa Cruz customers who since converted to Linux. The most far-reaching theory is that development work that IBM did for AIX is considered a derivative work and therefore also owned by SCO. If this is upheld it would affect all Unix licensees. Under a program called SCOsource, the SCO Group is now offering licenses to all companies and individuals wishing to use operating systems with code based on UNIX System V Release 4 (and their own release, UNIX System V, Release 5). However, Novell disputed the SCO group's claim to hold copyright on the UNIX source base. According to Novell, SCO (and hence the SCO group) are effectively franchise operators for Novell, which also retained the core copyrights, veto rights over future licensing activities of SCO, and 95% of the licensing revenue. The SCO Group disagreed with this, and the dispute had resulted in the SCO v. Novell lawsuit. == Standards == Beginning in the late 1980s, an open operating system standardization effort known as POSIX provided a common baseline for all operating systems; IEEE based POSIX around the structure of the UNIX system. At around the same time a separate but very similar standard, the Single UNIX Specification, was also produced by the Open Group. Starting in 1998 these two standards bodies began work on merging the two standards, and the latest revisions of both are in fact a single identical document. The directory layout of some systems is defined by the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. == Free Unix-like operating systems == In 1983, Richard Stallman announced GNU, an ambitious effort to create a freely redistributable Unix-like system. Much of the software developed in this project -- such as the GNU toolchain, the glibc and the Coreutils-- has gone on to play central roles in other free UNIX systems as well, but GNU attempts to fulfill Stallman's original manifesto by providing a replacement for the UNIX kernel progressed very slowly. At present, the GNU Hurd, an attempt to provide an advanced kernel for GNU based on the Mach kernel, is still not considered close to production standard. In 1991, when Linus Torvalds began to publicize the Linux kernel and gather contributors, the GNU tools were an obvious match. When combined with the Linux kernel, the GNU software formed the foundation for a UNIX-like operating system known as GNU/Linux (commonly referred to as just Linux). Linux distribution of the kernel, GNU, and additional software -- such as Red Hat Linux and Debian -- have become popular both with hobbyists and in business. Yet GNU and Linux were not alone. With the 1994 settlement of a lawsuit UNIX Systems Laboratories brought against the University of California and Berkeley Software Design Inc. (USL v. BSDi), BSD UNIX experienced a renewal. The lawsuit clarified that Berkeley had the right to distribute BSD UNIX -- for free, if it so desired. Soon, the BSD release was being developed in several different directions, becoming the projects now known as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. FreeBSD, an alternative to Linux, has strong support and is the most popular of the BSD derivatives. OpenBSD is renowned for its security, while NetBSD focuses on porting the OS to many platforms. In an effort towards compatibility, several UNIX system vendors agreed on SVR4's Executable and Linkable Format format as standard for binary and object code files. The common format allows substantial binary compatibility among UNIX systems operating on the same hardware: thus, with compatible libraries, FreeBSD can run software compiled for Linux. Linux and the BSD kin are now rapidly occupying the market traditionally occupied by proprietary UNIX operating systems, as well as expanding into new markets such as the consumer desktop and mobile and embedded devices. A measure of this success may be seen when Apple Computer sought out a new foundation for its Macintosh operating system: it chose to develop a freely redistributable core operating system, Apple_Darwin, based on the BSD family and Mach_kernel. The deployment of Darwin BSD UNIX in Mac OS X makes it one of the most widely-used UNIX based systems on the market. == Impact == The UNIX system had a great impact on the surrounding community. Some consider it the most influential operating system in changing other proprietary operating systems, leading UNIX to be called "the most important operating system you may never use." Following the lead of Multics, it was written in high level language as opposed to assembler (assembler was in vogue at the time). It had a drastically simplified file model compared to many contemporary operating systems. The file system hierarchy contained machine services and devices (such as computer printers, computer terminals, or disk drives), providing a superficially uniform interface, but at the expense of requiring indirect mechanisms such as IOCTL and mode flags to access features of the hardware that did not fit the simple "stream of bytes" model. Unix also popularized the hierarchical file system with arbitrarily nested subdirectories, originally introduced by Multics. Other common operating systems of the era had ways to divide a storage device into multiple directories or sections, but they were a fixed number of levels and often only one level. The major proprietary operating systems all added recursive subdirectory capabilities also patterned after Multics. DEC's RSTS programmer/project hierarchy evolved into Virtual Memory System directories, CP/M's volumes evolved into MS-DOS 2.0+ subdirectories, and HP's MPE group.account hierarchy and IBM's System 36 and OS/400 library systems were folded into broader POSIX file systems. Making the command interpreter an ordinary user-level program, with additional commands provided as separate programs, was another Multics innovation popularized by Unix. The UNIX shell used the same language for interactive commands as for scripting (shell scripts -- there was no separate job control language, like IBM's JCL for example). Since the shell and OS commands were "just another program", the user could choose (or even write) his/her own shell. Finally, new commands could be added without compiler the shell. Unix's innovative command-line syntax for creating chains of producer-consumer processes (pipes) made a powerful programming technique (coroutines) widely available. A fundamental simplifying assumption of UNIX was its focus on ASCII text for 100% of its I/O package and the assumption that the machine word was a multiple of 8 bits in size. There were no "binary" editors in the original version of UNIX - the entire system was configured using text shell commands and the least and greatest common denominator in the I/O system is the text byte - unlike "record-based" file systems in other computers. The focus on text for representing "everything" made UNIX pipes useful. The focus on text and 8-bit bytes made the system far more scalable and portable than other systems. Over time text-based applications have also won in application areas, such as printing languages (Postscript - not Interpress - an earlier effort by the same people), and when feasible, at the application layer of the Internet Protocols, i.e. Telnet, FTP, SMTP, HTTP, SIP, XML, etc. Unix popularised a syntax for regular expressions that found much wider use. The UNIX programming interface became the basis for a standard operating system interface (POSIX, see above). The C programming language, now ubiquitous in systems and applications programming, originated under UNIX, and spread more quickly than UNIX. The C language was the first agnostic language that did not attempt to force a coding style upon the programmer (e.g. support for 3 types of loops and all types of parameter passing.) The C language was the first programming languages to access a computer's full instruction set (e.g. masking, shifting, auto increment, auto decrement, jump tables, pointers.) However, the unsafeness of C leads to problems such as buffer overruns from C library functions such as gets() and scanf(), which are behind many notorious bugs, including one exploited by the Morris worm. Early UNIX developers were important in bringing the theory of software modularity and re-use into engineering practice. UNIX provided the TCP/IP networking protocol on relatively inexpensive computers, which later resulted in the Internet explosion of world-wide real-time connectivity. This quickly exposed several major security holes in the UNIX architecture, kernel, and system utilities. Over time, the leading developers of UNIX (and programs that ran on it) developed a set of cultural norms for developing software, norms which became as important and influential as the technology of UNIX itself. See Unix philosophy for more information. == Branding == In 1994, Novell, the company that owned the rights to the Unix System V source at the time, sold the right to use the ''name'' of the Unix software to the X/Open Company (now The Open Group), but they sold the rights to the actual software to the original Santa Cruz Operation company (not to be confused with SCO, which renamed itself to SCO after it bought parts of the first SCO). Now, "UNIX" is a trademark of The Open Group and, like all trademarks, should be used as an adjective followed by a generic term such as "system." By decree of The Open Group, the term refers more to a class of operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification should be able to bear the "UNIX" and UNIX98 trademarks today, after the operating system's vendor pays a fee to The Open Group. Systems licensed to use the UNIX® trademark include AIX operating system, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris Operating Environment, Tru64, A/UX and a part of z/OS. In practice, the term, especially when written as "Un*x", "*NIX", or "*N?X" is applied to a number of other multiuser POSIX-based systems such as GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD that do not seek UNIX branding because the royalties would be too expensive for a product marketed to consumers or freely available over the Internet; such systems claim that the term has now become a genericized trademark. The term "Unix" is also used, and in fact was the original capitalisation, but the name UNIX stuck because, in the words of Dennis Ritchie "when presenting the original UNIX paper to the third Operating Systems Symposium of the American Association for Computing Machinery, we had just acquired a new typesetter and were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps" (quoted from the Jargon File, version 4.3.3, 20 September 2002). Additionally, it should be noted that many of the operating system's predecessors and contemporaries used all-uppercase lettering, because many computer terminals of the time could not produce lower-case letters, so many people wrote the name in upper case due to force of habit. Several plural forms of Unix are used to refer to multiple brands of Unix and Unix-like systems. Most common is the conventional "Unixes", but the Hacker culture that created Unix has a penchant for playful use of language, and "Unices" (treating Unix as Latin word) is also popular. The Anglo-Saxon plural form "Unixen" is not common, although occasionally seen. ==Canonical UNIX Commands== The most basic UNIX commands/utilities are: * Directory/file creation/navigation: ls cd (DOS / Unix Command) pwd mkdir rm (Unix) rmdir cp find * File viewing, editing: touch (Unix) more ed vi emacs ex (Unix) * Text processing: echo (computing) cat (Unix) grep sort uniq sed awk tail tee head (Unix) cut (Unix) tr (program) split (Unix) printf * File comparison: comm (Unix) cmp diff patch (Unix) * Misc shell tools: yes (disambiguation) test xargs * System administration: chmod chown ps (Unix) su (computing) w who (Unix) * Communication: email client telnet ftp finger protocol ssh * Shells: Unix shell C shell Korn shell tcsh Here is a list of the 60 user commands from section 1 of the First Edition: ar as B programming language bas (Unix) bcd boot (Unix command) cat (Unix) chdir check (Unix) chmod chown cmp cp (Unix) date (Unix) db (Unix) dbppt dc (Unix) df (Unix) dsw dtf du (Unix) ed find (Unix) for (Unix) form (Unix) hup (Unix) lbppt ld (Unix) ln (Unix) ls mail (Unix) mesg mkdir mkfs mount mv (Unix) nm (Unix) od (Unix) pr (Unix) rew rkd rkf rkl rm (Unix) rmdir roff sdate sh stat strip su (Unix) sum (Unix) tap (Unix) tm (Unix) tty type (Unix) un (Unix utility) wc (Unix utility) who (Unix) write (Unix) For a more complete and modern list, see the list of Unix programs. See also: /dev/null, /dev/random, /dev/urandom, /dev/zero. == See also == * Plan 9 from Bell Labs - the successor of Unix developed at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and others. *BSD license *''Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code'' documents the 6th edition of Unix. *Pipe (computing)s **Filter (Unix) **Pipeline (Unix) *Rare mode *Single UNIX Specification *''UNIX-HATERS Handbook'' *Unix-like **GNU Hurd **Cygwin **MinGW **Minix **further BSD#BSD_descendants * List of UNIX daemons * Unix manual * Unix wars * List of computer term etymologies * Comparison of file systems == External links == * [http://www.unix.com/ The UNIX Forums - the Top UNIX & Linux Q&A on the Web ] * [http://www.tru64.org Tru64.org] * [http://www.enterpriseunix.org EnterpriseUNIX.org] * * [http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Unix/ Unix @ dmoz.org] * http://www.UNIX-systems.org/ -- The Open Group UNIX System Homepage * http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/freebooks.html -- The Unix Pestilence (an anti-unix website) * http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/acro/index.htm -- The Unix Acronym List * [http://tuxmobil.org/mylaptops.html UniX on laptops and notebooks] * Operating systems Unix lv:UNIX ms:UNIX nds:Unix simple:Unix th:ยูนิกซ์
==Pipes== Somehow, some reference to Pipe (computing) seems compulsory. Is there a good reason why it is not included? -- User:4lex 10:35 13 Jul 2003 (UTC) : You are very welcome to include it yourself, just find an appropriate place to mention it. See also: Wikipedia:Be bold in updating pages. -- User:Ap Sun Jul 13 20:31:37 UTC 2003 The Impact section ought to be moved to the top of the article, ahead of history, and someone needs to go over it carefully to make sure it catches everything Unix did; pipes should go in there. Have ken/dmr's original ACM article in hand when doing this, that paper does a first-class job of listing what was novel and key. The section could also use some copy editing. User:Jnc 11:27, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC) ==History issues== Someone should get ahold of a copy of the early history of Unix article written by ken/dmr that appeared in the Unix BSTJ issue, and check the history section of this page for errors. I fixed many of the worst ones, but I'm still dubious about a few things. Also, I temporarily deleted this line from the end of the history section: The development of Linux was set upon this back-drop, and one can understand why Linux became so popular (and continues to be so popular) in the face of legal wars over the ownership of Unix. because it can be read in a way that's not true; the GNU project (which fostered Linux) was started to develop freely available source in the 1980's, long before even Novell bought Linux. The issue was whether code was public domain or not. If someone rewrites it carefully, to say what really happened, and clearly, something like it could go back, but I don't have the energy right now. User:Jnc 11:22, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC) :Three corrections: First, Novell bought Unix, not Linux. Second, the GNU Project did not foster Linux, having had its own kernel project (HURD); rather, Linux among other Unix-like systems (such as NeXT) made use of GNU's compiler and other software. Last, GNU software is not in the public domain, which would mean that it was not covered by copyright; rather, it is copyrighted but licensed for free source redistribution. --User:Fubar Obfusco 23:00, 21 Sep 2003 (UTC) : Ooops, you're right, Novell bought Unix, not Linux - that was just a thinko/typo on my part. As for the "public domain", I was being lax in my terminology (I do know all about the CopyLeft); I really just meant "publicly available" (without any definitive specific meaning). : I will however debate the other point, about "GNU didn't foster Unix". Did the "publically available" compiler, utilities etc give Linus (and the many people who've added to Linux) an incentive? I would think they did; even if he didn't know about it when he first started, Linux certainly became part of that whole "open source" conglomerate (which GNU did get rolling) pretty quickly, and I doubt it would have become what it is today without it. I wonder how much Linus knew about GNU when he started? User:Jnc 22:56, 24 Sep 2003 (UTC) :: I'm not sure whether Linus knew about the HURD when he started Linux, though I seem to recall reading that he had not. He came from a Minix background. Linux was begun in '91, when gcc was already getting wide use on proprietary Unix systems as an alternative to commercial compilers. (The first commercial system to use gcc as its native compiler was the NeXT, prototyped in '88 and released in '90.) So gcc and the GNU toolset was probably an obvious choice, if not a forced move. ::: Linus knew full well what the HURD was - Linux was intended to allow people to run the GNU utilities without having to own UNIX because HURD was taking forever to be released. Thats the whole reason for Linux to exist - the HURD had not been finished. :: I took your expression "the GNU project (which fostered Linux)" as meaning that GNU ''set out to'' support Linux in its early stages of development. I'm not sure if that's the case; the GNU people were focused on their own kernel. But you seem to have meant, rather, that GNU software was ''useful'' to Linux in starting up. That's certainly true. :: Incidentally, the term "open source" was created by ESR and Perens in the late '90s IIRC -- some time ''after'' Linux was already becoming popular -- as a "marketing term", an explicitly less political-sounding alternative to the GNU term "free software". --User:Fubar Obfusco 03:56, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC) :: Yes, I did ''not'' mean "fostered" in the sense that "GNU set out to support Linux in its early stages of development"; rather, I meant that the whole GNU/FSF movement was a hospitable home to Linux, and helped it develop (much as foster parents help a child who comes into their home). :::Then we're in agreement there. --User:Fubar Obfusco :: If nothing else, I think the earliest GNU/FSF work predated Linux - I recall the early stages of the GNU work from when I was still physically at Tech Square, and I'm sure we'd never heard of Linux at that point. It's possible that Linus had already started work in a corner somewhere, independently, but someone would have to compare the exact timings. :::"Someone" has already -- Wikipedia. GNU was launched in 1983, Linux in 1991. As I mentioned above, Unix users were using other GNU software such as gcc (and emacs) years before Linux. The GNU kernel, HURD, was also already in development. --User:Fubar Obfusco :: As to "free software", I agree that was poor word choice on RMS' part; people were too likely to misunderstand his real goal. He never meant "free" as in "no charge" (even in the earliest stages, he was reasonably realistic about the economics of the real world :-), he always meant free as in "no painful restrictions" - especially in making the source fully available, for people to fix problems, customize, enhance, etc. I suspect he'd be the first to agree that "open source" is a far better, and more descriptive, term for his real goal. User:Jnc 12:48, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC) :::I did not say that "free software" was a poor word choice. I don't even think so. RMS did not mean "free" as in "no painful restrictions", but rather "free" as in "liberty". He created GNU and coined "free software" in a conscious ''political'' response to what he perceived as the growing enclosure by computer companies of software created and developed freely in academia. Recall, that was in the early '80s. "Open source" doesn't enter into it until ''over 15 years later,'' when a number of free-software advocates were trying to sell the idea to venture-capitalists during the Internet boom. It wasn't intended to be ''more descriptive'' so much as ''less political'', to sell free software to people leery of "freedom" talk. --User:Fubar Obfusco 13:33, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC) ==Last non-commercial version== Comment about Version 8 being the last non commercial version of Unix needs to be checked. Xenix was based on Version 7 so was Unisoft's first version of Unix for the Motorola 68000. I believe that version 6 was the last non commercial version of Unix. Eddie Bleasdale eddie@netproject.com : I would say that 10th Edition was non comercial(only sold/given to a few universities), and it was the last True Unix release. User:Lost.goblin 18:03, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC) == UNIX -vs- Unix == Anonymous user from 24.64.223.205 just went through the page and replaced "Unix" with "UNIX" throughout. This seems unnecessary. Both spellings are widely attested (even in Unix manuals!), but the original is "Unix" -- which also seems to be more popular among those who actually ''use'' Unix. --User:Fubar Obfusco 11:19, 3 Oct 2003 (UTC) : I agree that Unix is more popular and that it should probaly be Unix, however the last para (or so) says that UNIX is the ingrained name, so I'm not sure whether to leave or revert... User:Dysprosia 11:28, 3 Oct 2003 (UTC) : I think that Unix should be preferred, like in the Jargon file and elsewhere. --User:Shallot 13:39, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC) :: The trademark is UNIX. http://www.unix-systems.org/ uses UNIX consistently. ''The UNIX Programming Environment'' by Brian W. Kernighan uses UNIX. So, it seems to me that the formal spelling is UNIX, but there sure is a lot of use of the alternative Unix as well when you do an Amazon search for books with UNIX in the title, or just sample the newsgroups by doing a Google.com search for UNIX. A hard call! - User:Bevo 18:34, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC) : For reference, here is the relevant excerpt from the Jargon File: ::: ''Some people are confused over whether this word is appropriately `UNIX' or `Unix'; both forms are common, and used interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie says that the `UNIX' spelling originally happened in CACM's 1974 paper The UNIX Time-Sharing System because "we had a new typesetter and troff had just been invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps." Later, dmr tried to get the spelling changed to `Unix' in a couple of Bell Labs papers, on the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He failed, and eventually (his words) "wimped out" on the issue. So, while the trademark today is `UNIX', both capitalizations are grounded in ancient usage; the Jargon File uses `Unix' in deference to dmr's wishes.'' : And from FOLDOC: ::: ''"Unix" or "UNIX"? Both seem roughly equally popular, perhaps with a historical bias toward the latter. "UNIX" is a registered trademark of The Open Group, however, since it is a name and not an acronym, "Unix" has been adopted in this dictionary except where a larger name includes it in upper case. Since the OS is case-sensitive and exists in many different versions, it is fitting that its name should reflect this.'' : I think that those rationales make sense. Also, it's probably not particularly advisable to use a trademarked string in just about every sentence that may or may not be in accord with the trademark holder's wishes... --User:Shallot 18:58, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC) :A note with regard to Unix v. UNIX - since the most recent events in the SCO v. IBM Linux Lawsuit, a ''rough'' convention exists; UNIX has been used to signify that the operating system in question is compliant with the Open Groups' Single UNIX specification standards for UNIX operating systems, while Unix has been used to signify that an OS contains (or did once contain) code from the ancestral code base. On a related note *nix has come to signify operating systems that work ''like'' UNIX, but aren't by code and Open Group certification. This is mainly a Groklaw usage, but it makes it easier to write about the various flavours. :: In case it needs to be explicated, we seem to have picked up on the same convention, except that we don't use ''*nix'' but Unix-like. --User:Joy 18:53, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) : As Examples, AIX (IBMs UNIX), is both a Unix and a UNIX. The BSDs are Unix (because they include or were built upon ancestral code - see USL v. BSDi), but most are not UNIX as they haven't been certified. Linux isn't Unix (presuming innocence of the defence in SCO v. IBM), because it has no ancestral code, but some (very few) versions have been UNIX, as they conformed to Open Group specifications. Linux is a *nix. Confusing, isn't it? User:SkArcher 23:05, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC) : I lean greatly in favour of UNIX as it is the correct term (as mentioned above referencing the trademark) and this is an encyclopedia! I believe Unix is more popular in the UNIX community because they get slack of writing the correct name. It is worth the extra effort. If this is decided, then I also think that the redirect should be Unix->UNIX, not the other way around as it is currently to keep things uniform. User:Avochelm 10:26, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC) :: Calling it "the correct term" is just begging the question, since obviously we want to give the article the correct title. The question here is, which ''is'' the correct term? This is especially tricky since ''several different things'' are being referred to. The Groklaw distinction between genetic-Unix and trademark-Unix (or UNIX) is worthwhile ... however, there plenty of people who use the word "Unix" to encompass Linux and other systems which are neither. It is probably not our place to call their usage "incorrect", although we may certainly say that it is not the usage preferred by the Open Group. :: As it stands, the most common usage among Unix users is "Unix". I hold that we can and should safely continue to use this expression (and certainly not the affected jargon "*nix" or "*n*x") for this very reason. --User:Fubar Obfusco 16:07, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC) == "classic" / "canonical" UNIX commands? == This seems to be just a listing of common commands in *NIX distributions these days. "Classic" to me would imply coming from old AT&T, SYSV, or BSD Unices, but this list includes GNU innovations like less, bash, tcsh, and the modern ssh. Maybe the section should be renamed. : I agree, and have done so. It is now Canonical UNIX Commands --User:Jeffwarnica, 22:13, 26 Sep 2004 : I've since removed bash and zsh, they're late 80s stuff and not really considered canonical. Tcsh is a fair bit older than both and written by an original csh guy, it should probably stay. I also dropped sam and less. I'll keep SSH because it's become fairly canonical over the years. --User:Joy 19:00, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) :: I think some of those choices sound rather arbitrary, specially I think it's unfair to leave sam out having in mind that it was developed at the Labs and it's to this day used by many of the original Unix developers(Ken, Dennis, Brian and Duff are all known sam users, and I'm sure there are more) also I would add the rc shell as it's the official successor of /bin/sh User:Lost.goblin 21:47, 2005 Jun 20 (UTC) :::I have been a user of Unix from 1977 to now, and I've never heard of sam. It apparently only runs under GUIs with mice, so I don't see how it can possibly be 'canonical', regardless of how popular or how good it is. --User:Macrakis 22:28, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC) :::: Sam was developed during the early 80's at Bell Labs for the first bitmaped Unix terminal and has been used by most of the Unix team since then, it's roots go back to sed, which is the original Unix text editor. I think it's much more unix-worthy than Emacs with was developed outside Unix and only later on ported to Unix, and it has never fit with the way Unix works. User:Lost.goblin 11:50, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC) :::::If the sam article is correct, sam wasn't developed for Unix, either, but for Plan 9. Although I am a longtime and heavy Emacs user, I would agree that Emacs is not a "classic" Unix command. First of all, it isn't really a "command" but an interactive system. Second, it is cross-OS (I have used it on ITS, Tenex, TOPS-20, various Unixes, and Windows). As for sam being rooted in sed, I don't think that's relevant -- after all, Perl is rooted in sh and awk, but is hardly "classic". --User:Macrakis 15:56, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) ::::::The sam article was correct but unclear(I fixed it now), sam was originally writen for the DMD 5620 windowing terminal which ran Unix in the early 80's, Plan 9 was not started until years later, but as the Unix team at bell labs moved to Plan 9, sam was ported to the new system, ironically most sam users this days(like Tom Duff use an X port of the Plan 9 version. Also sam is a more clear descendant of ed than perl of awk and sh, Ken Thompson the original author of ed was very involved in the design of the sam command language. User:Lost.goblin 17:56, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC) :::::: I used pretty much the same reasoning as Macrakis when considering ''sam''. I really don't want to get into an Emacs bashing game, but fact is that it has existed since 1976 on OSs older than Unix (while Plan 9 is younger than Unix) and that it is much better known than sam. And you can't really include vi without including emacs :) --User:Joy 17:03, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) This dialog only highlights the need to classify properly. There is at any given time a command set which is considered by many users to be "classic", but this changes with time and doesn't really correspond to any historical reality. For an encyclopedia article we should identify the historical development of the toolset, at least from the Bell Labs V7 UNIX onwards. UNIX V1. in PDP7 assembler, already had ar, as, cat, cp, df, du, ln, ls, mail, od, su, wc and who, all of which are in everyday use in modern Unixes. Fourth edition in '74, by which time UNIX had been rewritten in C, introduced pipes, which more even than the hierarchical filesystem, gave UNIX its characteristic flavor and geek-friendly reputation [http://minnie.tuhs.org/Seminars/AUUG96/pdppaper.html]. V7 brought us K&R C, uucp and Bourne shell. sccs and named pipes were introduced at Bell Labs as part of Programmer's Workbench {PWB) [http://infocom.cqu.edu.au/Units/aut98/85321/Study_Material/Resource_Materials/UNIX_History/Serious/]. Somewhere along the line "make" appeared... --User:Tony Sidaway|User talk:Tony Sidaway 12:28, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) :Absolutely. The definitions need to be clearer. --User:Macrakis 15:56, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) : The word "canonical" also needs to be qualified better, almost as much as "classic" does. --User:Joy 17:03, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) == UNIX vs Linux/FreeBSD/etc == Perhaps a section from someone more knowledgable than myself should be added regarding the differences between UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. From my experience in both UNIX and Linux environments, UNIX-like operating systems seem to not follow UNIX standards as strictly as Linux does! What inner-architecture advantage (be it kernel, file system, etc) does UNIX have over its clones that still makes UNIX popular among companies and organizations who operate their data systems on mainframe computers? --User:69.234.183.71 19:42, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC) =="Unremarkable"== 4.228.216.247 removed the following sentence from the start of the History section: : ''As is often the case with developments that go on to become highly popular and influential, the beginnings of UNIX are unremarkable.'' I agree that it's basically opinionizing (editorializing if you prefer). In fact, the statement is POV. Personally I don't find the beginnings of Unix at all unremarkable. The concept of a kernel plus tools appears to have been present from an early date, as was the then-revolutionary concept of a hierarchical filesystem, apparently borrowed from MULTICS. The "can do" atmosphere at Bell Labs at the time also undoubtedly was remarkable. --User:Tony Sidaway|User talk:Tony Sidaway 13:35, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC) :Either the statement is blatent POV with little or no suporting evidence in which case it needs to be removed no matter how long it has been here, or it is a quote from another source on unix history in which case it has merit but needs to be removed because it is plagerism (or credited proerly). --User:Ssd 05:16, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::Or you just don't want to accept the fact that, when Unix started out, it really WAS no big deal, and was just written so that the principal authors could continue playing their computer games. ::This is NOT to diminish the tremendous contributions that Unix has made, but its origins, whether you like it or not, were humble. Not exactly an animal's manger, but similar. ::User:Atlant 14:59, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC) :::First, I don't see how calling something's beginnings unremarkable really adds anything to the article. Secondly, it is obviously a very POV opinion, true or not. Is the opinion credible? If so, credit it. If not, it's worthless and needs to go. --User:Ssd 03:42, 13 May 2005 (UTC) :::: I agree, the whole statement(starting with ''As is often...'') does not add any value to the article and should be removed User:Lost.goblin 20:42, 2005 May 14 (UTC) == SUPER-UX and UNICOS ? == No mention of SUPER-UX and UNICOS ?
This category concerns Unix and Unix-like operating systems and related software. Operating systems
{| cellpadding="1" style="float: right; border: 1px solid #8888aa; background: #f7f8ff; padding: 5px; font-size: 95%; margin: 0 15px 0 15px;" |- | style="background: #ccf; text-align: center;" | Unix programs |- | Navigation: ls (unix), cd (unix), mv (unix), rm (unix), ln (unix) |- | Permissions: su (unix), chmod, chroot |- | Help: man (unix), info (unix), |- | Editors: nano (unix), pico (unix), vi (unix), vim, joe (unix) etc. |- | Package management: apt-get, dpkg, rpm (unix), yum (unix), etc. |- |style="border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc"| |- |style="text-align: center;"|[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Template:Unix&action=edit Edit this box] | |} Unix Unix programs
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Unix_Amiga_Emulator
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Unix_billennium
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Unix_domain_sockets
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Unix_epoch
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Unix_File_System
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UNIX_manual
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Unix_manual
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Unix_people
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Unix_philosophy
Unix_process
Unix_programs
Unix_programs/Daemons
Unix_programs/General_commands
Unix_programs/Shells
Unix_programs/Utilities
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UNIX_shell
Unix_shell
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Unix_system
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UNIX_System_III
UNIX_System_Labs
UNIX_System_Services
UNIX_System_V
Unix_System_V
UNIX_time
Unix_time
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Unix_timestamp
Unix_Time_Stamp
Unix_to_Unix_Copy_Protocol
UNIX_wars
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UNIX
#REDIRECT Unix
Unix
Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of ATT Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T, several other commercial vendors, as well as several non-profit organizations. UNIX was designed to be portability, computer multitasking and multi-user. The Unix systems are characterized by various concepts: plain text files, command line interpreter, hierarchical file system, etc. In software engineering, Unix is mainly noted for its use of the C programming language and the so-called Unix philosophy. The present owner of the UNIX trademark is The Open Group, while the present claimants on the rights to the UNIX source code are The SCO Group and Novell. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as "UNIX" (others are called "UNIX system-like" or Unix-like). ==History== ===1960s and 1970s=== In the 1960s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric worked on an experimental operating system called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), which was designed to run on the GE-645 mainframe computer. The aim was the creation of an interactive operating system with many novel capabilities, including enhanced security. The project did develop production releases, but initially these releases turned out to have poor performance. AT&T Bell Labs pulled out and deployed its resources elsewhere. One of the developers on the Bell Labs team, Ken Thompson, continued to develop for the GE-645 mainframe, and wrote a game for that computer called Space Travel. However, he found that the game was slow on the GE machine and was costly, apparently costing $75 per go in scarce computing time. Thompson thus re-wrote the game in Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-7 assembly_language with help from Dennis Ritchie. This experience, combined with his work on the Multics project, led Thompson to start a new operating system for the DEC PDP-7. Thompson and Ritchie led a team of developers, including Rudd Canaday, at Bell Labs developing a file system as well as the new multi-tasking operating system itself. They included a Command line interpreter and some small utility programs as well. This project was called UNICS, short for Uniplexed Information and Computing System, and could support two simultaneous users. The name has been attributed to Brian Kernighan, and was a Hack (technology slang) on ''Multics''. Following bad puns of UNICS (homophone of eunuchs) being a castrated MULTICS, the name was later changed to UNIX, and thus a legacy was born. The name is also a criticism of the overly general and bloated MULTICS system - UNIX would do one thing, and do it well. Up until this point there had been no financial support from Bell Labs, when the Computer Science Research Group wanted to use UNIX on a much larger machine than the PDP-7. Thompson and Ritchie managed to trade the promise of adding text processing capabilities to UNIX for a PDP-11/20 machine, and this itself led to some financial support from Bell. For the first time in 1970, the UNIX Operating System was officially named and ran on the PDP-11/20. It added a text formatting program called roff and a text editor. All three were written in PDP-11/20 assembly language. This initial "text processing system", made up of UNIX, roff, and the editor, was used by Bell Labs for text processing of patent applications at Bell. Runoff soon evolved into troff, the first electronic publishing program with a full typesetting capability. The ''UNIX Programmer's Manual'' was published on November 3, 1971. In 1973, the decision was made to re-write UNIX in the C programming language. The change meant that UNIX could later easily be modified to work on other machines (thus becoming portable), and other variations could be created by other developers. The code was now more concise and compact, leading to an acceleration in the development of UNIX. AT&T made UNIX available to universities and commercial firms, as well as the United States government under licenses. The licenses included all source code except for the machine-dependent kernel, which was written in PDP-11 assembly code. However, bootleg copies of the annotated UNIX machine-dependent kernel circulated widely in the late 1970's. Development expanded, with Versions 4, 5 and 6 being released by 1975. These versions added Pipe_(Unix)s, leading to the development of a more modular code-base, increasing development speed still further. By 1978, over 600 machines were running UNIX in some form. Version 7, the last version of Research UNIX to be released widely, was released in 1979. Versions 8, 9 and 10 were developed through the 1980s but were only ever released to a few universities, though they did generate papers describing the new work. This research led to the development of Plan 9 (operating system), a new portable distributed system. ===1980s=== AT&T now developed UNIX System III, based on Version 7, as a commercial version and sold the product directly, the first version launching in 1982. However its subsidiary, Western Electric, continued to sell older UNIX versions, based on the UNIX System (Versions 1 to 7). To end the confusion between all the differing versions, AT&T combined various versions developed at other universities and companies into UNIX System V Release 1. This introduced features such as the vi editor and curses (programming library) from the Berkeley Software Distribution of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). This also included support for the DEC VAX machine. The new commercial UNIX releases however no longer included the source code and so UCB continued to develop BSD UNIX as an alternative to UNIX System III and V, originally on the PDP-11 architecture (the BSD 2.x releases, ending with 2.10). Perhaps the most important aspect of the BSD development effort was the addition of TCP/IP Computer network code to the mainstream UNIX Kernel (computer science). The BSD effort produced eight significant releases that contained network code: 4.1c, 4.2, 4.3, 4.3-Tahoe ("Tahoe" being the nickname of the CCI Power 6/32 architecture that was the first non-DEC port of the BSD kernel), 4.3-Reno (to match the "Tahoe" naming, and that the release was something of a gamble), Net2, 4.4, and 4.4-lite. The network code found in these releases is the ancestor of almost all TCP/IP network code in use today, including code that was later released in AT&T System V UNIX and Microsoft Windows. Other companies began to offer commercial versions of the UNIX System for their own mini-computers and workstations. Most of these new UNIX flavors were developed from the System V base under a license from AT&T. Others chose BSD instead. One of the leading developers of BSD, Bill Joy, went on to co-found Sun Microsystems in 1982 and create SunOS (now Solaris) for their workstation computers. In 1980, Microsoft announced its first UNIX for 16-bit microcomputers called Xenix, which the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) ported to the Intel 8086 processor in 1983, and eventually branched Xenix into SCO UNIX in 1989. In 1984, an industry group called X/Open was formed, with the aim of forming compatible open systems, that is, standardize the UNIX systems. AT&T added various features into UNIX System V, such as file locking, system administration, job control (modelled on Incompatible Time Sharing), standard streams, the Remote File System and Transport Layer Interface. AT&T cooperated with Sun Microsystems and between 1987 and 1989 merged Xenix, BSD, SunOS, and System V into System V Release 4 (SVR4), independently of X/Open. This new release consolidated all the previous features into one package, and threatened the end of competing versions. It also greatly increased licensing fees. ===1990s=== In 1990, the Open Software Foundation released OSF/1, their standard Unix implementation, and it was more closely based on BSD than on SVR4. OSF was started in 1988 and funded by several Unix-related companies that wished to counteract AT&T's and Sun's collaboration on SVR4. AT&T and another group of licensees then proceeded to form the group "UNIX International" inorder to counteract OSF. This escalation of conflict between competing vendors gave rise to the syntagma "Unix wars". In 1991, a group of BSD developers (Donn Seeley, Mike Karels, Bill Jolitz, and Trent Hein) left the University of California to found Berkeley Software Design, Inc (BSDI). BSDI was the first company to produce a fully-functional commercial version of BSD UNIX for the inexpensive and ubiquitous Intel platform, which started a wave of interest in the use of inexpensive hardware for production computing. Shortly after it was founded, Bill Jolitz left BSDI to pursue distribution of 386BSD, commonly identified as the free software ancestor of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. By 1993 most of the commercial vendors of UNIX had changed their commercial variants of UNIX to be based upon System V Release 4, and many BSD features were added on top. In 1994, OSF stopped the development of OSF/1, as the only vendor using it was Digital Equipment Corporation, who branded it Digital UNIX. Shortly after UNIX System V Release 4 was produced, AT&T sold all its rights to UNIX to Novell. Dennis Ritchie, one of the creators of UNIX, likened this to the Biblical story of Esau selling his birthright for some lentils [http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=7379%40ucsbcsl.ucsb.edu&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Ddennis%2Britchie%2Blentil%2Bbirthright%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D7379%2540ucsbcsl.ucsb.edu%26rnum%3D1]. Novell developed its own version, UnixWare, merging its Netware with UNIX System V Release 4. Novell tried to use this to battle against Windows NT, but their core markets suffered considerably. In 1994, Novell decided to split the bundle of UNIX-related assets and sell parts of them. The UNIX trademark and the certification rights were sold to the X/Open Consortium. In 1996, X/Open merged with Open Software Foundation, creating the Open Group. Various standards by the Open Group now define what is and what is not a "UNIX" operating system, notably the post-1998 Single UNIX Specification. In 1995, the business of administration and support of the existing UNIX licenses plus rights to further develop the SystemV code base were transferred to the Santa Cruz Operation. Whether Novell also sold the copyrights is currently the subject of litigation (see below). ===2000s=== In 2000, the Santa Cruz Operation sold its entire UNIX business and assets to Caldera Systems, which later on changed its name to The SCO Group. This new player then started SCO-Linux controversies against various users and vendors of Linux. The SCO Group has offered various legal theories over the course of several cases. Some of these allege that Linux contains copyrighted Unix code now owned by The SCO Group. Others allege trade-secret violations by IBM, or contract violations by former Santa Cruz customers who since converted to Linux. The most far-reaching theory is that development work that IBM did for AIX is considered a derivative work and therefore also owned by SCO. If this is upheld it would affect all Unix licensees. Under a program called SCOsource, the SCO Group is now offering licenses to all companies and individuals wishing to use operating systems with code based on UNIX System V Release 4 (and their own release, UNIX System V, Release 5). However, Novell disputed the SCO group's claim to hold copyright on the UNIX source base. According to Novell, SCO (and hence the SCO group) are effectively franchise operators for Novell, which also retained the core copyrights, veto rights over future licensing activities of SCO, and 95% of the licensing revenue. The SCO Group disagreed with this, and the dispute had resulted in the SCO v. Novell lawsuit. == Standards == Beginning in the late 1980s, an open operating system standardization effort known as POSIX provided a common baseline for all operating systems; IEEE based POSIX around the structure of the UNIX system. At around the same time a separate but very similar standard, the Single UNIX Specification, was also produced by the Open Group. Starting in 1998 these two standards bodies began work on merging the two standards, and the latest revisions of both are in fact a single identical document. The directory layout of some systems is defined by the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. == Free Unix-like operating systems == In 1983, Richard Stallman announced GNU, an ambitious effort to create a freely redistributable Unix-like system. Much of the software developed in this project -- such as the GNU toolchain, the glibc and the Coreutils-- has gone on to play central roles in other free UNIX systems as well, but GNU attempts to fulfill Stallman's original manifesto by providing a replacement for the UNIX kernel progressed very slowly. At present, the GNU Hurd, an attempt to provide an advanced kernel for GNU based on the Mach kernel, is still not considered close to production standard. In 1991, when Linus Torvalds began to publicize the Linux kernel and gather contributors, the GNU tools were an obvious match. When combined with the Linux kernel, the GNU software formed the foundation for a UNIX-like operating system known as GNU/Linux (commonly referred to as just Linux). Linux distribution of the kernel, GNU, and additional software -- such as Red Hat Linux and Debian -- have become popular both with hobbyists and in business. Yet GNU and Linux were not alone. With the 1994 settlement of a lawsuit UNIX Systems Laboratories brought against the University of California and Berkeley Software Design Inc. (USL v. BSDi), BSD UNIX experienced a renewal. The lawsuit clarified that Berkeley had the right to distribute BSD UNIX -- for free, if it so desired. Soon, the BSD release was being developed in several different directions, becoming the projects now known as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. FreeBSD, an alternative to Linux, has strong support and is the most popular of the BSD derivatives. OpenBSD is renowned for its security, while NetBSD focuses on porting the OS to many platforms. In an effort towards compatibility, several UNIX system vendors agreed on SVR4's Executable and Linkable Format format as standard for binary and object code files. The common format allows substantial binary compatibility among UNIX systems operating on the same hardware: thus, with compatible libraries, FreeBSD can run software compiled for Linux. Linux and the BSD kin are now rapidly occupying the market traditionally occupied by proprietary UNIX operating systems, as well as expanding into new markets such as the consumer desktop and mobile and embedded devices. A measure of this success may be seen when Apple Computer sought out a new foundation for its Macintosh operating system: it chose to develop a freely redistributable core operating system, Apple_Darwin, based on the BSD family and Mach_kernel. The deployment of Darwin BSD UNIX in Mac OS X makes it one of the most widely-used UNIX based systems on the market. == Impact == The UNIX system had a great impact on the surrounding community. Some consider it the most influential operating system in changing other proprietary operating systems, leading UNIX to be called "the most important operating system you may never use." Following the lead of Multics, it was written in high level language as opposed to assembler (assembler was in vogue at the time). It had a drastically simplified file model compared to many contemporary operating systems. The file system hierarchy contained machine services and devices (such as computer printers, computer terminals, or disk drives), providing a superficially uniform interface, but at the expense of requiring indirect mechanisms such as IOCTL and mode flags to access features of the hardware that did not fit the simple "stream of bytes" model. Unix also popularized the hierarchical file system with arbitrarily nested subdirectories, originally introduced by Multics. Other common operating systems of the era had ways to divide a storage device into multiple directories or sections, but they were a fixed number of levels and often only one level. The major proprietary operating systems all added recursive subdirectory capabilities also patterned after Multics. DEC's RSTS programmer/project hierarchy evolved into Virtual Memory System directories, CP/M's volumes evolved into MS-DOS 2.0+ subdirectories, and HP's MPE group.account hierarchy and IBM's System 36 and OS/400 library systems were folded into broader POSIX file systems. Making the command interpreter an ordinary user-level program, with additional commands provided as separate programs, was another Multics innovation popularized by Unix. The UNIX shell used the same language for interactive commands as for scripting (shell scripts -- there was no separate job control language, like IBM's JCL for example). Since the shell and OS commands were "just another program", the user could choose (or even write) his/her own shell. Finally, new commands could be added without compiler the shell. Unix's innovative command-line syntax for creating chains of producer-consumer processes (pipes) made a powerful programming technique (coroutines) widely available. A fundamental simplifying assumption of UNIX was its focus on ASCII text for 100% of its I/O package and the assumption that the machine word was a multiple of 8 bits in size. There were no "binary" editors in the original version of UNIX - the entire system was configured using text shell commands and the least and greatest common denominator in the I/O system is the text byte - unlike "record-based" file systems in other computers. The focus on text for representing "everything" made UNIX pipes useful. The focus on text and 8-bit bytes made the system far more scalable and portable than other systems. Over time text-based applications have also won in application areas, such as printing languages (Postscript - not Interpress - an earlier effort by the same people), and when feasible, at the application layer of the Internet Protocols, i.e. Telnet, FTP, SMTP, HTTP, SIP, XML, etc. Unix popularised a syntax for regular expressions that found much wider use. The UNIX programming interface became the basis for a standard operating system interface (POSIX, see above). The C programming language, now ubiquitous in systems and applications programming, originated under UNIX, and spread more quickly than UNIX. The C language was the first agnostic language that did not attempt to force a coding style upon the programmer (e.g. support for 3 types of loops and all types of parameter passing.) The C language was the first programming languages to access a computer's full instruction set (e.g. masking, shifting, auto increment, auto decrement, jump tables, pointers.) However, the unsafeness of C leads to problems such as buffer overruns from C library functions such as gets() and scanf(), which are behind many notorious bugs, including one exploited by the Morris worm. Early UNIX developers were important in bringing the theory of software modularity and re-use into engineering practice. UNIX provided the TCP/IP networking protocol on relatively inexpensive computers, which later resulted in the Internet explosion of world-wide real-time connectivity. This quickly exposed several major security holes in the UNIX architecture, kernel, and system utilities. Over time, the leading developers of UNIX (and programs that ran on it) developed a set of cultural norms for developing software, norms which became as important and influential as the technology of UNIX itself. See Unix philosophy for more information. == Branding == In 1994, Novell, the company that owned the rights to the Unix System V source at the time, sold the right to use the ''name'' of the Unix software to the X/Open Company (now The Open Group), but they sold the rights to the actual software to the original Santa Cruz Operation company (not to be confused with SCO, which renamed itself to SCO after it bought parts of the first SCO). Now, "UNIX" is a trademark of The Open Group and, like all trademarks, should be used as an adjective followed by a generic term such as "system." By decree of The Open Group, the term refers more to a class of operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification should be able to bear the "UNIX" and UNIX98 trademarks today, after the operating system's vendor pays a fee to The Open Group. Systems licensed to use the UNIX® trademark include AIX operating system, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris Operating Environment, Tru64, A/UX and a part of z/OS. In practice, the term, especially when written as "Un*x", "*NIX", or "*N?X" is applied to a number of other multiuser POSIX-based systems such as GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD that do not seek UNIX branding because the royalties would be too expensive for a product marketed to consumers or freely available over the Internet; such systems claim that the term has now become a genericized trademark. The term "Unix" is also used, and in fact was the original capitalisation, but the name UNIX stuck because, in the words of Dennis Ritchie "when presenting the original UNIX paper to the third Operating Systems Symposium of the American Association for Computing Machinery, we had just acquired a new typesetter and were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps" (quoted from the Jargon File, version 4.3.3, 20 September 2002). Additionally, it should be noted that many of the operating system's predecessors and contemporaries used all-uppercase lettering, because many computer terminals of the time could not produce lower-case letters, so many people wrote the name in upper case due to force of habit. Several plural forms of Unix are used to refer to multiple brands of Unix and Unix-like systems. Most common is the conventional "Unixes", but the Hacker culture that created Unix has a penchant for playful use of language, and "Unices" (treating Unix as Latin word) is also popular. The Anglo-Saxon plural form "Unixen" is not common, although occasionally seen. ==Canonical UNIX Commands== The most basic UNIX commands/utilities are: * Directory/file creation/navigation: ls cd (DOS / Unix Command) pwd mkdir rm (Unix) rmdir cp find * File viewing, editing: touch (Unix) more ed vi emacs ex (Unix) * Text processing: echo (computing) cat (Unix) grep sort uniq sed awk tail tee head (Unix) cut (Unix) tr (program) split (Unix) printf * File comparison: comm (Unix) cmp diff patch (Unix) * Misc shell tools: yes (disambiguation) test xargs * System administration: chmod chown ps (Unix) su (computing) w who (Unix) * Communication: email client telnet ftp finger protocol ssh * Shells: Unix shell C shell Korn shell tcsh Here is a list of the 60 user commands from section 1 of the First Edition: ar as B programming language bas (Unix) bcd boot (Unix command) cat (Unix) chdir check (Unix) chmod chown cmp cp (Unix) date (Unix) db (Unix) dbppt dc (Unix) df (Unix) dsw dtf du (Unix) ed find (Unix) for (Unix) form (Unix) hup (Unix) lbppt ld (Unix) ln (Unix) ls mail (Unix) mesg mkdir mkfs mount mv (Unix) nm (Unix) od (Unix) pr (Unix) rew rkd rkf rkl rm (Unix) rmdir roff sdate sh stat strip su (Unix) sum (Unix) tap (Unix) tm (Unix) tty type (Unix) un (Unix utility) wc (Unix utility) who (Unix) write (Unix) For a more complete and modern list, see the list of Unix programs. See also: /dev/null, /dev/random, /dev/urandom, /dev/zero. == See also == * Plan 9 from Bell Labs - the successor of Unix developed at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and others. *BSD license *''Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code'' documents the 6th edition of Unix. *Pipe (computing)s **Filter (Unix) **Pipeline (Unix) *Rare mode *Single UNIX Specification *''UNIX-HATERS Handbook'' *Unix-like **GNU Hurd **Cygwin **MinGW **Minix **further BSD#BSD_descendants * List of UNIX daemons * Unix manual * Unix wars * List of computer term etymologies * Comparison of file systems == External links == * [http://www.unix.com/ The UNIX Forums - the Top UNIX & Linux Q&A on the Web ] * [http://www.tru64.org Tru64.org] * [http://www.enterpriseunix.org EnterpriseUNIX.org] * * [http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Unix/ Unix @ dmoz.org] * http://www.UNIX-systems.org/ -- The Open Group UNIX System Homepage * http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/freebooks.html -- The Unix Pestilence (an anti-unix website) * http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/acro/index.htm -- The Unix Acronym List * [http://tuxmobil.org/mylaptops.html UniX on laptops and notebooks] * Operating systems Unix lv:UNIX ms:UNIX nds:Unix simple:Unix th:ยูนิกซ์
Unix
==Pipes== Somehow, some reference to Pipe (computing) seems compulsory. Is there a good reason why it is not included? -- User:4lex 10:35 13 Jul 2003 (UTC) : You are very welcome to include it yourself, just find an appropriate place to mention it. See also: Wikipedia:Be bold in updating pages. -- User:Ap Sun Jul 13 20:31:37 UTC 2003 The Impact section ought to be moved to the top of the article, ahead of history, and someone needs to go over it carefully to make sure it catches everything Unix did; pipes should go in there. Have ken/dmr's original ACM article in hand when doing this, that paper does a first-class job of listing what was novel and key. The section could also use some copy editing. User:Jnc 11:27, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC) ==History issues== Someone should get ahold of a copy of the early history of Unix article written by ken/dmr that appeared in the Unix BSTJ issue, and check the history section of this page for errors. I fixed many of the worst ones, but I'm still dubious about a few things. Also, I temporarily deleted this line from the end of the history section: The development of Linux was set upon this back-drop, and one can understand why Linux became so popular (and continues to be so popular) in the face of legal wars over the ownership of Unix. because it can be read in a way that's not true; the GNU project (which fostered Linux) was started to develop freely available source in the 1980's, long before even Novell bought Linux. The issue was whether code was public domain or not. If someone rewrites it carefully, to say what really happened, and clearly, something like it could go back, but I don't have the energy right now. User:Jnc 11:22, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC) :Three corrections: First, Novell bought Unix, not Linux. Second, the GNU Project did not foster Linux, having had its own kernel project (HURD); rather, Linux among other Unix-like systems (such as NeXT) made use of GNU's compiler and other software. Last, GNU software is not in the public domain, which would mean that it was not covered by copyright; rather, it is copyrighted but licensed for free source redistribution. --User:Fubar Obfusco 23:00, 21 Sep 2003 (UTC) : Ooops, you're right, Novell bought Unix, not Linux - that was just a thinko/typo on my part. As for the "public domain", I was being lax in my terminology (I do know all about the CopyLeft); I really just meant "publicly available" (without any definitive specific meaning). : I will however debate the other point, about "GNU didn't foster Unix". Did the "publically available" compiler, utilities etc give Linus (and the many people who've added to Linux) an incentive? I would think they did; even if he didn't know about it when he first started, Linux certainly became part of that whole "open source" conglomerate (which GNU did get rolling) pretty quickly, and I doubt it would have become what it is today without it. I wonder how much Linus knew about GNU when he started? User:Jnc 22:56, 24 Sep 2003 (UTC) :: I'm not sure whether Linus knew about the HURD when he started Linux, though I seem to recall reading that he had not. He came from a Minix background. Linux was begun in '91, when gcc was already getting wide use on proprietary Unix systems as an alternative to commercial compilers. (The first commercial system to use gcc as its native compiler was the NeXT, prototyped in '88 and released in '90.) So gcc and the GNU toolset was probably an obvious choice, if not a forced move. ::: Linus knew full well what the HURD was - Linux was intended to allow people to run the GNU utilities without having to own UNIX because HURD was taking forever to be released. Thats the whole reason for Linux to exist - the HURD had not been finished. :: I took your expression "the GNU project (which fostered Linux)" as meaning that GNU ''set out to'' support Linux in its early stages of development. I'm not sure if that's the case; the GNU people were focused on their own kernel. But you seem to have meant, rather, that GNU software was ''useful'' to Linux in starting up. That's certainly true. :: Incidentally, the term "open source" was created by ESR and Perens in the late '90s IIRC -- some time ''after'' Linux was already becoming popular -- as a "marketing term", an explicitly less political-sounding alternative to the GNU term "free software". --User:Fubar Obfusco 03:56, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC) :: Yes, I did ''not'' mean "fostered" in the sense that "GNU set out to support Linux in its early stages of development"; rather, I meant that the whole GNU/FSF movement was a hospitable home to Linux, and helped it develop (much as foster parents help a child who comes into their home). :::Then we're in agreement there. --User:Fubar Obfusco :: If nothing else, I think the earliest GNU/FSF work predated Linux - I recall the early stages of the GNU work from when I was still physically at Tech Square, and I'm sure we'd never heard of Linux at that point. It's possible that Linus had already started work in a corner somewhere, independently, but someone would have to compare the exact timings. :::"Someone" has already -- Wikipedia. GNU was launched in 1983, Linux in 1991. As I mentioned above, Unix users were using other GNU software such as gcc (and emacs) years before Linux. The GNU kernel, HURD, was also already in development. --User:Fubar Obfusco :: As to "free software", I agree that was poor word choice on RMS' part; people were too likely to misunderstand his real goal. He never meant "free" as in "no charge" (even in the earliest stages, he was reasonably realistic about the economics of the real world :-), he always meant free as in "no painful restrictions" - especially in making the source fully available, for people to fix problems, customize, enhance, etc. I suspect he'd be the first to agree that "open source" is a far better, and more descriptive, term for his real goal. User:Jnc 12:48, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC) :::I did not say that "free software" was a poor word choice. I don't even think so. RMS did not mean "free" as in "no painful restrictions", but rather "free" as in "liberty". He created GNU and coined "free software" in a conscious ''political'' response to what he perceived as the growing enclosure by computer companies of software created and developed freely in academia. Recall, that was in the early '80s. "Open source" doesn't enter into it until ''over 15 years later,'' when a number of free-software advocates were trying to sell the idea to venture-capitalists during the Internet boom. It wasn't intended to be ''more descriptive'' so much as ''less political'', to sell free software to people leery of "freedom" talk. --User:Fubar Obfusco 13:33, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC) ==Last non-commercial version== Comment about Version 8 being the last non commercial version of Unix needs to be checked. Xenix was based on Version 7 so was Unisoft's first version of Unix for the Motorola 68000. I believe that version 6 was the last non commercial version of Unix. Eddie Bleasdale eddie@netproject.com : I would say that 10th Edition was non comercial(only sold/given to a few universities), and it was the last True Unix release. User:Lost.goblin 18:03, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC) == UNIX -vs- Unix == Anonymous user from 24.64.223.205 just went through the page and replaced "Unix" with "UNIX" throughout. This seems unnecessary. Both spellings are widely attested (even in Unix manuals!), but the original is "Unix" -- which also seems to be more popular among those who actually ''use'' Unix. --User:Fubar Obfusco 11:19, 3 Oct 2003 (UTC) : I agree that Unix is more popular and that it should probaly be Unix, however the last para (or so) says that UNIX is the ingrained name, so I'm not sure whether to leave or revert... User:Dysprosia 11:28, 3 Oct 2003 (UTC) : I think that Unix should be preferred, like in the Jargon file and elsewhere. --User:Shallot 13:39, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC) :: The trademark is UNIX. http://www.unix-systems.org/ uses UNIX consistently. ''The UNIX Programming Environment'' by Brian W. Kernighan uses UNIX. So, it seems to me that the formal spelling is UNIX, but there sure is a lot of use of the alternative Unix as well when you do an Amazon search for books with UNIX in the title, or just sample the newsgroups by doing a Google.com search for UNIX. A hard call! - User:Bevo 18:34, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC) : For reference, here is the relevant excerpt from the Jargon File: ::: ''Some people are confused over whether this word is appropriately `UNIX' or `Unix'; both forms are common, and used interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie says that the `UNIX' spelling originally happened in CACM's 1974 paper The UNIX Time-Sharing System because "we had a new typesetter and troff had just been invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps." Later, dmr tried to get the spelling changed to `Unix' in a couple of Bell Labs papers, on the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He failed, and eventually (his words) "wimped out" on the issue. So, while the trademark today is `UNIX', both capitalizations are grounded in ancient usage; the Jargon File uses `Unix' in deference to dmr's wishes.'' : And from FOLDOC: ::: ''"Unix" or "UNIX"? Both seem roughly equally popular, perhaps with a historical bias toward the latter. "UNIX" is a registered trademark of The Open Group, however, since it is a name and not an acronym, "Unix" has been adopted in this dictionary except where a larger name includes it in upper case. Since the OS is case-sensitive and exists in many different versions, it is fitting that its name should reflect this.'' : I think that those rationales make sense. Also, it's probably not particularly advisable to use a trademarked string in just about every sentence that may or may not be in accord with the trademark holder's wishes... --User:Shallot 18:58, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC) :A note with regard to Unix v. UNIX - since the most recent events in the SCO v. IBM Linux Lawsuit, a ''rough'' convention exists; UNIX has been used to signify that the operating system in question is compliant with the Open Groups' Single UNIX specification standards for UNIX operating systems, while Unix has been used to signify that an OS contains (or did once contain) code from the ancestral code base. On a related note *nix has come to signify operating systems that work ''like'' UNIX, but aren't by code and Open Group certification. This is mainly a Groklaw usage, but it makes it easier to write about the various flavours. :: In case it needs to be explicated, we seem to have picked up on the same convention, except that we don't use ''*nix'' but Unix-like. --User:Joy 18:53, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) : As Examples, AIX (IBMs UNIX), is both a Unix and a UNIX. The BSDs are Unix (because they include or were built upon ancestral code - see USL v. BSDi), but most are not UNIX as they haven't been certified. Linux isn't Unix (presuming innocence of the defence in SCO v. IBM), because it has no ancestral code, but some (very few) versions have been UNIX, as they conformed to Open Group specifications. Linux is a *nix. Confusing, isn't it? User:SkArcher 23:05, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC) : I lean greatly in favour of UNIX as it is the correct term (as mentioned above referencing the trademark) and this is an encyclopedia! I believe Unix is more popular in the UNIX community because they get slack of writing the correct name. It is worth the extra effort. If this is decided, then I also think that the redirect should be Unix->UNIX, not the other way around as it is currently to keep things uniform. User:Avochelm 10:26, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC) :: Calling it "the correct term" is just begging the question, since obviously we want to give the article the correct title. The question here is, which ''is'' the correct term? This is especially tricky since ''several different things'' are being referred to. The Groklaw distinction between genetic-Unix and trademark-Unix (or UNIX) is worthwhile ... however, there plenty of people who use the word "Unix" to encompass Linux and other systems which are neither. It is probably not our place to call their usage "incorrect", although we may certainly say that it is not the usage preferred by the Open Group. :: As it stands, the most common usage among Unix users is "Unix". I hold that we can and should safely continue to use this expression (and certainly not the affected jargon "*nix" or "*n*x") for this very reason. --User:Fubar Obfusco 16:07, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC) == "classic" / "canonical" UNIX commands? == This seems to be just a listing of common commands in *NIX distributions these days. "Classic" to me would imply coming from old AT&T, SYSV, or BSD Unices, but this list includes GNU innovations like less, bash, tcsh, and the modern ssh. Maybe the section should be renamed. : I agree, and have done so. It is now Canonical UNIX Commands --User:Jeffwarnica, 22:13, 26 Sep 2004 : I've since removed bash and zsh, they're late 80s stuff and not really considered canonical. Tcsh is a fair bit older than both and written by an original csh guy, it should probably stay. I also dropped sam and less. I'll keep SSH because it's become fairly canonical over the years. --User:Joy 19:00, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) :: I think some of those choices sound rather arbitrary, specially I think it's unfair to leave sam out having in mind that it was developed at the Labs and it's to this day used by many of the original Unix developers(Ken, Dennis, Brian and Duff are all known sam users, and I'm sure there are more) also I would add the rc shell as it's the official successor of /bin/sh User:Lost.goblin 21:47, 2005 Jun 20 (UTC) :::I have been a user of Unix from 1977 to now, and I've never heard of sam. It apparently only runs under GUIs with mice, so I don't see how it can possibly be 'canonical', regardless of how popular or how good it is. --User:Macrakis 22:28, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC) :::: Sam was developed during the early 80's at Bell Labs for the first bitmaped Unix terminal and has been used by most of the Unix team since then, it's roots go back to sed, which is the original Unix text editor. I think it's much more unix-worthy than Emacs with was developed outside Unix and only later on ported to Unix, and it has never fit with the way Unix works. User:Lost.goblin 11:50, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC) :::::If the sam article is correct, sam wasn't developed for Unix, either, but for Plan 9. Although I am a longtime and heavy Emacs user, I would agree that Emacs is not a "classic" Unix command. First of all, it isn't really a "command" but an interactive system. Second, it is cross-OS (I have used it on ITS, Tenex, TOPS-20, various Unixes, and Windows). As for sam being rooted in sed, I don't think that's relevant -- after all, Perl is rooted in sh and awk, but is hardly "classic". --User:Macrakis 15:56, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) ::::::The sam article was correct but unclear(I fixed it now), sam was originally writen for the DMD 5620 windowing terminal which ran Unix in the early 80's, Plan 9 was not started until years later, but as the Unix team at bell labs moved to Plan 9, sam was ported to the new system, ironically most sam users this days(like Tom Duff use an X port of the Plan 9 version. Also sam is a more clear descendant of ed than perl of awk and sh, Ken Thompson the original author of ed was very involved in the design of the sam command language. User:Lost.goblin 17:56, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC) :::::: I used pretty much the same reasoning as Macrakis when considering ''sam''. I really don't want to get into an Emacs bashing game, but fact is that it has existed since 1976 on OSs older than Unix (while Plan 9 is younger than Unix) and that it is much better known than sam. And you can't really include vi without including emacs :) --User:Joy 17:03, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) This dialog only highlights the need to classify properly. There is at any given time a command set which is considered by many users to be "classic", but this changes with time and doesn't really correspond to any historical reality. For an encyclopedia article we should identify the historical development of the toolset, at least from the Bell Labs V7 UNIX onwards. UNIX V1. in PDP7 assembler, already had ar, as, cat, cp, df, du, ln, ls, mail, od, su, wc and who, all of which are in everyday use in modern Unixes. Fourth edition in '74, by which time UNIX had been rewritten in C, introduced pipes, which more even than the hierarchical filesystem, gave UNIX its characteristic flavor and geek-friendly reputation [http://minnie.tuhs.org/Seminars/AUUG96/pdppaper.html]. V7 brought us K&R C, uucp and Bourne shell. sccs and named pipes were introduced at Bell Labs as part of Programmer's Workbench {PWB) [http://infocom.cqu.edu.au/Units/aut98/85321/Study_Material/Resource_Materials/UNIX_History/Serious/]. Somewhere along the line "make" appeared... --User:Tony Sidaway|User talk:Tony Sidaway 12:28, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) :Absolutely. The definitions need to be clearer. --User:Macrakis 15:56, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) : The word "canonical" also needs to be qualified better, almost as much as "classic" does. --User:Joy 17:03, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC) == UNIX vs Linux/FreeBSD/etc == Perhaps a section from someone more knowledgable than myself should be added regarding the differences between UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. From my experience in both UNIX and Linux environments, UNIX-like operating systems seem to not follow UNIX standards as strictly as Linux does! What inner-architecture advantage (be it kernel, file system, etc) does UNIX have over its clones that still makes UNIX popular among companies and organizations who operate their data systems on mainframe computers? --User:69.234.183.71 19:42, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC) =="Unremarkable"== 4.228.216.247 removed the following sentence from the start of the History section: : ''As is often the case with developments that go on to become highly popular and influential, the beginnings of UNIX are unremarkable.'' I agree that it's basically opinionizing (editorializing if you prefer). In fact, the statement is POV. Personally I don't find the beginnings of Unix at all unremarkable. The concept of a kernel plus tools appears to have been present from an early date, as was the then-revolutionary concept of a hierarchical filesystem, apparently borrowed from MULTICS. The "can do" atmosphere at Bell Labs at the time also undoubtedly was remarkable. --User:Tony Sidaway|User talk:Tony Sidaway 13:35, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC) :Either the statement is blatent POV with little or no suporting evidence in which case it needs to be removed no matter how long it has been here, or it is a quote from another source on unix history in which case it has merit but needs to be removed because it is plagerism (or credited proerly). --User:Ssd 05:16, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::Or you just don't want to accept the fact that, when Unix started out, it really WAS no big deal, and was just written so that the principal authors could continue playing their computer games. ::This is NOT to diminish the tremendous contributions that Unix has made, but its origins, whether you like it or not, were humble. Not exactly an animal's manger, but similar. ::User:Atlant 14:59, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC) :::First, I don't see how calling something's beginnings unremarkable really adds anything to the article. Secondly, it is obviously a very POV opinion, true or not. Is the opinion credible? If so, credit it. If not, it's worthless and needs to go. --User:Ssd 03:42, 13 May 2005 (UTC) :::: I agree, the whole statement(starting with ''As is often...'') does not add any value to the article and should be removed User:Lost.goblin 20:42, 2005 May 14 (UTC) == SUPER-UX and UNICOS ? == No mention of SUPER-UX and UNICOS ?
Unix
This category concerns Unix and Unix-like operating systems and related software. Operating systems
Unix
{| cellpadding="1" style="float: right; border: 1px solid #8888aa; background: #f7f8ff; padding: 5px; font-size: 95%; margin: 0 15px 0 15px;" |- | style="background: #ccf; text-align: center;" | Unix programs |- | Navigation: ls (unix), cd (unix), mv (unix), rm (unix), ln (unix) |- | Permissions: su (unix), chmod, chroot |- | Help: man (unix), info (unix), |- | Editors: nano (unix), pico (unix), vi (unix), vim, joe (unix) etc. |- | Package management: apt-get, dpkg, rpm (unix), yum (unix), etc. |- |style="border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc"| |- |style="text-align: center;"|[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Template:Unix&action=edit Edit this box] | |} Unix Unix programs
See other meanings of words starting from letter:
U
UA | UB | UC | UD | UE | UF | UG | UH | UI | UJ | UK | UL | UM | UN | UO | UP | UR | US | UT | UW | UX | UY | UZ |Words begining with Unix:
UNIX
Unix
Unix
Unix
Unix
UNIX-HATERS_Handbook
Unix-haters_handbook
UNIX-like
Unix-like
Unix-like
Unix-like_operating_system
Unix-shell_programming_language_family
Unix-stub
UNIX-style
Unix-style
UNIX/32V
UNIX98
UNIXCOFFEE928
UNIXCOFFEE928
Unixer
Unixes
Unixgold
Unixmiah
UnixODBC
UnixOS2
Unixslug
Unixslug
Unixtime
UnixWare
Unixware
Unix_Amiga_Delitracker_Emulator
Unix_Amiga_Emulator
Unix_billenium
Unix_billennium
Unix_billennium
Unix_commands
Unix_commands
UNIX_domain_sockets
Unix_domain_sockets
Unix_epoch
Unix_epoch
Unix_File_System
Unix_File_System
Unix_file_types
UNIX_manual
UNIX_manual
Unix_manual
Unix_manual
Unix_people
Unix_philosophy
Unix_philosophy
Unix_process
Unix_programs
Unix_programs/Daemons
Unix_programs/General_commands
Unix_programs/Shells
Unix_programs/Utilities
Unix_security
UNIX_shell
UNIX_shell
Unix_shell
Unix_shell
Unix_shells
Unix_stubs
UNIX_system
Unix_system
Unix_system
UNIX_Systems_Laboratories
UNIX_System_III
UNIX_System_Labs
UNIX_System_Services
UNIX_System_V
Unix_System_V
UNIX_time
Unix_time
Unix_time
Unix_timestamp
Unix_Time_Stamp
Unix_to_Unix_Copy_Protocol
UNIX_wars
Unix_wars
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