The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

https://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

by oliverkwebb • 11 months ago

214 147 11 months ago

simson.net

tomhow• 11 months ago

Discussed a little, previously...

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40110729 - April 2024 (87 comments)

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38464715 - Nov 2023 (139 comments)

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417690 - May 2022 (86 comments)

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 - March 2019 (157 comments)

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13781815 - March 2017 (307 comments)

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976694 - July 2015 (5 comments)

The Unix Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726115 - May 2014 (50 comments)

Anti-foreword to the Unix haters handbook by dmr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3106271 - Oct 2011 (31 comments)

The Unix Haters Handbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272975 - April 2010 (28 comments)

The Unix Hater’s Handbook, Reconsidered - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319773 - Sept 2008 (5 comments)

microtonal2• 11 months ago

As an aside: Hacker News is getting old, the 2008 discussion is closer to the book’s year (1994) than it is to now.

cperciva• 11 months ago

I just realized that my most famous comment on HN is the same age as I was when I won the Putnam.

cm21872• 11 months ago

And for the millennials: compare the distance between your birth and ww2 vs your birth and now!

JdeBP4• 11 months ago

Anyone who thinks that that is a lot should see how much it, and of course the mailing list, were brought up on Usenet in the 1990s. (-:

floren• 11 months ago

I've always liked the end of the anti-foreword:

Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.

EarlKing• 11 months ago

You forgot the last bit: "Bon appetite!"

Definitely the politest way anyone has ever been told to eat shit in human history.

B1FF_PSUVM2• 11 months ago

Props for the inclusion of that in the book. "Mighty white of them", as they used to say in Bechuanaland.

echelon_musk• 11 months ago

My first instinct was that this phrase is racist, especially with you saying it was used in an ex-British southern African colony.

This was the best I could find as to its origins:

https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-thats-mighty-whi...

cyberax5• 11 months ago

I want to write a systemd haters handbook.

Like:

1. You start and stop services with 'systemctl start/stop nginx'. But logs for that service can be read through an easy-to-remember 'journalctl -xeu nginx.service'. Why not 'systemctl logs nginx'? Nobody knows.

2. If you look at the built-in help for systemctl, the top-level options list things like `--firmware-setup` and `--image-policy`.

3. systemd unifies devices, mounts, and services into unit files with consistent syntax. Except where it doesn't. For example, there's a way to specify a retry policy for a regular service, but not for mount units. Why? Nobody knows.

(To be clear, I _like_ systemd. But it definitely follows the true Unix philosophy of being wildly internally inconsistent.)

bionsystem• 11 months ago

Systemd got better with time and I got better with it over time, which makes it acceptable for me now. I still miss SMF from Solaris years later though. I'm sure there are better systems out there but when the ubiquity is not there it's really hard to adopt them especially in corporate environments. And then you have to learn 2 things if you want to use something else at home, which is already too much for me...

Bluecobra• 11 months ago

I also liked SMF as well, but I do admit I “cheated” by using a website to make the XML service manifests.

dotancohen• 11 months ago

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter... no but really if you ever do get around to writing that I want to read it. Ping me somehow, my Gmail username is the same as my HN username. Happy writing!

kloud3• 11 months ago

+1 I think such writing would find its audience.

What I would like to see is something that is to systemd what PipeWire is to PulseAudio.

Before PulseAudio getting audio to work properly was a struggle. PA introduced useful abstractions, but when it was rolled out it was a buggy mess. Eventually it got good over time. Then PipeWire comes in, and it does more with less. The transition was so smooth, I did not even realize it I had been running it for a while, just one day I noticed it in the update logs.

systemd now works well enough, but it would be nice to get rid of that accumulated cruft.

dizhn• 11 months ago

systemd and pulseaudio are by the same guy (avahi too). He just writes shit software that sort of works.

majewsky• 11 months ago

The reason that PulseAudio did not work at first (and PipeWire worked out of the gate), is that PulseAudio and PipeWire use a lot of relatively newer kernel audio APIs that previous sound daemons did not use. Therefore driver implementations of those APIs were untested and hence buggy when PulseAudio first started using them.

When people say "PulseAudio is not a broken mess anymore", what they really mean is "my audio driver is not a broken mess anymore".

e-khadem2• 11 months ago

These are fine points, and there are rough edges, but:

1. `systemctl status nginx.service` suffices in many cases. journalctl is for when you need to dig deeper, and it demands many more options. You would have complained about "too noisy CLI arguments" if these were unified.

2. I am not sure about how I should parse this. You mean there are too many arguments in total (2a) or the man page or the help message is not ordered correctly (2b)?

(2a). If you just care about services, you already know [well] a handful of subcommands (start, stop, enable, etc.) and just use those, the other args don't get in your way. For example your everyday commands have safe, sane default options that you will not have to override 99% of the time.

Furthermore, this is much better than the alternative of having a dozen different utilities that have a non-trivial inter-utility interaction that has to be solved externally. Sometimes an application that does (just) one thing won't do well.

(2b). This is subjective (?). I have experienced a few week-long total internet outages (in Iran). I had to study the man pages and my offline resources in those contingencies, and have generally been (extremely) satisfied with the breadth, depth, and the organization of the systems docs. In the age of LLMs this is much less of a problem anyways. I think reading the man page of a well-known utility is not an everyday task, and for a one-off case you will grep the man page anyways.

3. Your point is ~valid. But automount exists for ephermal resources. By default, we won't touch a failing drive without some precautions at least. So fail-fast and no retry is not always wrong. Perhaps it is virtue signaling ... On my PC I don't want to retry anything if a mount fails. In fact I might even want it to fail to boot so that it doesn't go undetected.

Also, for something as critical as mounting, I would probably want other "smart" behavior as well (exponential backoff for network, email, alert, DB fail-over, etc.) and these require specific application knowledge.

So ... they are trying to prevent a foot gun.

darkwater2• 11 months ago

1. `systemctl status nginx.service` suffices in many cases. journalctl is for when you need to dig deeper, and it demands many more options. You would have complained about "too noisy CLI arguments" if these were unified.

I'm not at all a systemd hater (I think it was needed and it's nowadays a very solid piece of software) but the logs thing should be totally tweakable when viewing it from `systemctl status` and it is n.... [goes to check the man page]

  -n, --lines=
           When used with status, controls the number of journal lines to show, counting from the most recent ones. Takes a positive integer argument, or 0 to disable journal output. Defaults to 10.

Oooh, so TIL.

atoav6• 11 months ago

I parsed (2) in the obvious way of: A manual should start with the common stuff 99% of people need and not with something obscure that you will only need once you are at the level that you know the tool you're using inside out.

That is like opening the manual for your dishwasher and reading a section about how you may check the control-boards conformal coating after the warranty has expired. Useful when you need it and have the repair skills, but a bad way to start a manual.

cyberax5• 11 months ago

1. systemctl already supports logging output, and it's already overloaded.

2. The options are not filtered, so useful options like ('--lines') are lost. E.g. what other options apply to "systemctl status"? The systemd documentation, in general, is a mess. It's a good _reference_ documentation (like 'man') but not a good guide.

3. Network filesystems exist. And they can become unavailable for a time.

hulitu• 11 months ago

I want to write a systemd haters handbook.

Why ? Systemd really fits the Unix haters handbook. It is anti unix as much as it can be ( one command to rule them all, binary logs, etc).

In the end it realy seems that the mantra: GNU is not UNIX is true. Just look at the GNU/Linux: pulseaudio, systemd, polkit, wayland, the big, fat linux kernel

bostik• 11 months ago

For a brief period of time, binary configs[0] were a thing. In mobile world only, but still. It wasn't that people generally wanted them, but because random seek I/O latency on early mobile devices (and especially on their eMMC storage devices) was atrocious.

Opening up tens or hundreds of XML config files for resync was disgustingly slow. I've developed software on Maemo and Scratchbox; the I/O wait for on-device config changes was a real problem. So of course someone came up with a modified concept of Windows registry - a single, binary format config storage, with a suitably "easy" API. As a result you'd sacrifice write/update latency for the cases where you wanted to modify configurations and gain a much improved read/refresh latency when reading them up.

Of course that all broke down when reading a single config block required to read the entire freaking binary dump and the config storage itself was bigger than the block device cache. Turns out that if you give app developers a supposedly easy and low-friction mechanism to store app configs, their respective PMs would go wild and demand that everything is configurable. Multiply by tens, even low hundreds of apps, each registering an idle-loop callback to re-read their configs to guarantee they would always have the correct settings ready. A system intended to improve config load/read times ended up generating an increased demand for already constrained read I/O.

0: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/dconf

anthk6• 11 months ago

GNU promotes Shepherd instead of SystemD.

b1123• 11 months ago

The inconsistency comes from the author thinking "All this init stuff is ancient, and filled with absurd work arounds, hacks, and inconsistencies. I'll fix that!". Then as time passes discovering that "Oh wait, I should add a hack for this special case, and this one, and this one, guess these were really needed!" as bug reports come in over the years.

To be fair, this could happen to any of us, especially early in career. But the real hubris is presuming that things are, as they are, without cause or reason. Along with never really knowing how things actually worked. Or why.

I envision a layperson (which is sort of understanding the author had of modern init systems, when starting on systemd). Said person walks up to a complex series of gears, and thinks a peg is just there for no reason, looks unused, and pulls it out. Only to have the whole mess go bananas. You can follow this logic with all of the half baked, partially implemented services like timekeeping, DNS, and others that barely work correctly, and go sideways if looked at funny.

I think if the author took their current knowledge, and this time wrote it from scratch, it could be far better.

However there still seems to be a chip on their shoulder, with an idea that "I'll fix Linux!" still, when in reality these fixes are just creating immense complication with very minimal upside. So any re-write would likely still be an over-complicated contraption.

kloud3• 11 months ago

When a complex system cannot be meaningfully reduced, another approach might be trying to reduce scope.

Current areas include managing services on a server, managing a single-user laptop, and enterprise features for fleet of devices/users.

There is some overlap at the core where sharing code is useful, but it feels way more complexity than needed gets shipped to my laptop. I wonder how much could be shaved off when focusing only on a single scenario.

jasonjayr• 11 months ago

The inconsistency comes from the author thinking "All this init stuff is ancient, and filled with absurd work arounds, hacks, and inconsistencies. I'll fix that!". Then as time passes discovering that "Oh wait, I should add a hack for this special case, and this one, and this one, guess these were really needed!" as bug reports come in over the years.

Don't forget the best one: "We don't support that uncommon use case, we will not accept nor maintain patches to support it, and you shoulden't do it that way anyway, and we are going to make it impossible in the future" -- to something that's worked well for decades.

kps• 11 months ago

“Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.” — Henry Spencer, 1987

cyberax5• 11 months ago

I disagree. As much as I dislike a lot of stuff in systemd, it was the _first_ init system that actually cares about reliability.

It evolved organically so it's a bit of a mess as a result, but it's the fate of most long-term projects (including Linux).

op00to4• 11 months ago

I like systemd too. After working with it for a long time, a lot of the "wtf" moments eventually are made clear as having at least some semblance of a good reason behind the decision.

1. systemctl is the controller. Its job is to change and report on the state of units. journalctl is the query engine. Merging the query engine into the systemctl controller would make the controller bloated and complex, so a dedicated tool is the cleaner approach. I think you can also rip out the journal and use other tools if you so decide, making building logs into systemctl a bad idea.

2. systemd is a system manager, not just a service manager. It replaced not only the old init system but also a collection of other tools that managed the machine's core state

3. A service runs a process, which can fail for many transient reasons. Trying again is a sensible and effective recovery strategy. A mount defines a state in the kernel. If it fails, it's almost always for a "hard" reason that an immediate retry won't fix. Retrying a failed mount would just waste time and spam logs during boot.

xandrius• 11 months ago

All those points could be fixed with a wrapper "systemd2" but I definitely see your points.

I like thinking of the minimum set of changes required to fix a problem and this could help, you probably could LLM most of it in less than 30min.

coreyh14444• 11 months ago

As someone in the midst of transitioning to Linux for the first time ever, the thing is: I still kinda hate Unix, but my AI friends (Claude Code / Codex) are very good at Unix/Linux and the everything is a file nature of it is amenable to AI helping me make my OS do what I want in a way that Windows definitely isn't.

pjmlp6• 11 months ago

On UNIX the "everything is a file" quickly breaks down, when networking, or features added post UNIX System V get used, but the meme still holds apparently.

If you want really everything is a file, that was fixed by UNIX authors in Plan 9 and Inferno.

dark-star4• 11 months ago

Yeah, I was really confused when I learned that every device was simply a file in /dev, except the network interfaces. I never understood why there is no /dev/eth0 ...

That was back in the mid-90s but even today I still don't understand why network interfaces are treated differently than other devices

blu3h4t• 11 months ago

I was recently thinking that object orientation is kind of everything is a file 2.0 in the form everything is an object I mean ofcourse didn’t pan out that good. Haven’t googled yet what people had to say about that already before. P.s. big fan of ur comments.

tankenmate2• 11 months ago

Some GOSIP (remember that?) implementations on some Unicies did have files for network connections, but it was very much in the minority. Since BSD was the home of the first widely usable socket() implementations for TCP/IP it became the norm; sockets are a file, but just not linked to any filesystem and control is connect()/accept() and the networking equivalent (setsockopt()) of the Unix system call dumping ground; ioctl().

zokier• 11 months ago

Well it depends on what "file" means. Linuxian interpretation would be that file is something you can get file descriptor for. And then the "everything is a file" mantra holds better again.

star-glider• 11 months ago

Linus finally relented and changed it to "everything is a stream of bits." Still, it's a useful metaphor and way to think about interacting with bits of the OS.

TrackerFF• 11 months ago

Having observed my fair share of beginners transition from win to linux, the most common source of pain I've seen is getting used to the file permissions, and playing fast and loose with sudo.

ok123456• 11 months ago

The problems of commercial Unix in 1993 are totally different from Linux in 2025.

swatson7412• 11 months ago

They certainly came up with a lot of good one-liners for this book.

I wonder why Dennis Ritchie was so infuriated though. He criticizes them for wanting simple functionality, but it's not because language is a powerful tool for solving problems it's because it limits the potential of the platform to it's functionality (which has been simplified and in of itself limited).

So this is confusing to me. Using language to solve problems is the advantage that Unix offers. But, neither the authors nor Dennis care about this? Or they do care in limited ways, but ultimately it's about something else?

awesome_dude• 11 months ago

Thous shalt not write criticisms of a demigod!

swatson7412• 11 months ago

He's more like a juggernaut talking thru people than a demigod leading mortals imo.

justin66• 11 months ago

dr wasn't infuriated. He would not have written a funny forward for them if he were.

epilys• 11 months ago

The only book I have that came with a barf bag. More books should do this.

ChrisMarshallNY• 11 months ago

Huh. I forgot Don Norman wrote the foreword.

modeless• 11 months ago

And "Worse is Better" was published here too? I don't know how anyone decided it was a good idea to make this, but I'm glad they did.

ferguess_k4• 11 months ago

As a side point, I believe David Cutler, the venerable OS engineer who programmed and designed three OSes, did not like Unix very much back in the 90s. I wonder what was the reason, and did he change his mind later?

JdeBP4• 11 months ago

It was because adding one to each of the letters in UNIX yields gibberish, but adding one to each of the letters in VMS gets WNT.

Era-appropriate joking aside: There's no actual evidence that Cutler held the views on Unix, or even on DEC's Eunice, that have been ascribed to xem from anecdotes by Armando Stettner and edits to Wikipedia and writing by G. Pascal Zachary. I and others went into more detail on this years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22814012

unwind• 11 months ago

Really? VOJY could easily be a modern company, couldn't it? The .dot was parked though ... :)

gonzopancho• 11 months ago

Didn’t Cutler design Mach?

ferguess_k4• 11 months ago

Thanks. Maybe I should change the question to "Which part of Unix design did D.C. think is less appropriate/desirable" to prevent fanning flames...

lizknope• 11 months ago

The only thing I remember is from the book Showstopper

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/14150/how...

[Cutler] expressed his low opinion of the Unix process input/output model by reciting "Get a byte, get a byte, get a byte byte byte" to the tune of the finale of Rossini's William Tell Overture.

phendrenad2• 11 months ago

Kind of crazy that what is possibly a throwaway remark by Cutler has become the basis for this whole "lore" of Dave hating Unix so much he went and made VMS (or variations on that theme). I guess it's a good story...

anthk6• 11 months ago

We need, OTOH, the other side of the coin:

The EMACS hater handbook. Under a GFDL license, of course.

No multithreading, I/O locks under GNUs/eww, glacial slow email header parsing under GNUs, huge badass file for RMAIL if you don't like GNUs (instead of parsing MailDir) and so on.

skydhash4• 11 months ago

I have no real experience with mbox and pop3 (maildir is what I’ve always used). But I still think you would need to partition mbox files because that’s what you would do with physical mail (which is the basis of the protocol and everything around it). I kinda like rmail.

tgv• 11 months ago

True, we don't need a vi(m) haters handbook. That's just natural.

flavio812• 11 months ago

No multithreading, I/O locks under GNUs/eww, glacial slow

All this would not happen if RMS had chosen Common Lisp to implement it...

anthk6• 11 months ago

RMS hates Common Lisp because it's a bit bloated (tons) and the closes to GNU Emacs written in CL it's Lem and it feels far slower than Emacs.

moomin• 11 months ago

I have a hard copy of this from back in the day. It’s a great read and a mixture of historical artefact and still relevant criticism.

e.g. It’s really interesting reading about LISP machines but no-one’s building a new one. Equally, all the criticism of sendmail and csh is valid but no-one uses them anymore either.

Most of the reliability criticisms have been addressed over the years but people are still trying to address the design of C, usually by replacing it. Equally, sh remains a problematic scripting language but at least it’s reliably there, unlike many of its many alternatives.

kragen2• 11 months ago

Yeah, I learned an enormous amount from it when I encountered it (in hard copy of course) in 01996, and some of what I learned is now no longer relevant.

There are some people building new Lisp machines: https://opencores.org/projects/igor https://github.com/lisper/cpus-caddr https://interlisp.org/ http://pt.withington.org/publications/LispM.html http://pt.withington.org/publications/VLM.html https://github.com/dseagrav/ld http://www.aviduratas.de/lisp/lispmfpga/ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/36_qKNErHAg https://frank-buss.de/lispcpu/

Also, Morello includes some Lisp-machine-like features. In my view knowing about the history of hardware architectures is far more important for designing new ones than for reproducing old ones.

smarks• 11 months ago

You encountered this book in 01996? Is that around the time of the Norman Conquest?

I'm assuming you're using octal here. Myself, I haven't used octal since 03677.

:-)

I see you mentioned https://interlisp.org/ ; while it's not a Lisp machine, the Medley Interlisp Project aims to recreate the Interlisp environment that ran on Xerox D-machines up through the 1980s or so. Still very interesting.

drweevil• 11 months ago

Equally, sh remains a problematic scripting language but at least it’s reliably there

I too still have a hard copy of this from way back. This book was my introduction to Unix, as I shifted from programming for DOS/Windows/NT to SunOS, and later, Linux. Despite the many issues (humorously) exposed by this book, the one thing that hooked me is what that quote above implies: It was accessible, durable, and thus worth taking the time to learn, warts and all.

flavio812• 11 months ago

It’s really interesting reading about LISP machines but no-one’s building a new one

There have been two open source Lisp Machine OS created in the last 15 or 10 years.

However a big part of the power of the Symbolics/LMI machines was in the software itself (applications), and this is still propietary code.

To reimplement the Lisp Machine applications would take quite a big effort.

amszmidt• 11 months ago

The LMI and MIT Lisp Machine source code is not proprietary since about 10 and 20 years respectively.

monocasa• 11 months ago

Pretty much all of the benefits provided by the hardware of lisp machines are provided by modern CPUs, just in more general ways.

Most of the benefit was pushing their interpreter into microcode, leaving more of the data bus free for actual data. Now we have ubiquitous icaches which give you a pseudo harvard architecture when it comes to the core's external bandwidth.

Some of the benefit was having a separate core with it's own microcode doing some of the garbage collection work. Now we have ubiquitous general multicore systems.

Etc.

salvesefu• 11 months ago

That Ken Pier quote in the preface is still nasty work.

nickpsecurity• 11 months ago

The good news is that we now have alternative UI's in web/mobile, microkernel-based systems, and unikernels in high-level languages... all in production use.

lalabert• 11 months ago

I have the edition that came with the ‘Unix Barf Bag’. All very unfair really as those humble beginnings have kept many of us gainfully employed!!

rconti• 11 months ago

Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there when you have that much RAM?

paulnpace• 11 months ago

Always a good one for internet point farming.

whartung• 11 months ago

I love Unix.

It's my favorite OS.

And I like it for its fundamental process model.

That combined with stdin/out and pipes.

All stitched together with a process aware shell.

Lots (most) OSes had a process concept. But in Unix, they not only existed, they were everywhere, they were dynamic, and they were "cheap". They were user accessible. A process with its ubiquitous stdin/out interface gave us great composablilty. We can click the processes together like legos.

For example, VMS had processes. But after 4 years of using it, I never tossed processes around using it like I did on Unix. I never "shelled out" of an editor. I never & something into the background. Just never came up. One terminal, one process.

On Unix, however, oh yea. Pipe construct on the command line, bang out of the editor, :r! in vi. And the eco-system the was created out of this simple concept. The "Unix Way(tm)".

And anything was a process. A C program. A shell script. At this level, everything was a "system language".

Then, They (those Unix wizard folks) made networking a well behaved citizen in this process stdin/out world. `inetd` could turn ANYTHING (because everything had stdin/out) into a network server. This command is magic: `ls | cpio -ov | rsh otherhost cat > /dev/tape`

Does `ls` know anything about file archives? No. Does `cpio` know anything about networking, or tape drives? No. Heck, `cat` doesn't know anything about tape drives.

You just could not, back in the day, plumb processes and computers together trivially like you could with Unix. Humans could do this. They didn't need to be wizard status, "admins", guys in white coats locked in the raised floor rooms, huffing Halon on the side. Assuming you could grok the arcane syntaxes (which, absolutely, were legion), you could make Unix do amazing things.

This flexibility allowed me to make all sorts of Rube-Goldbergian constructs of data flows and processes. Unix has always been empowering, and not constraining, once you accept it for what it is.

RichardCA2• 11 months ago

OK I have a question. I've been trying to track down a Unix book that was similar from that time period, covering command-line tools and shell programming. It had some funny cartoons in between the text. One particular cartoon featured a man who had spent too much time at the command line and was using single-word commands for everything, e.g. when he needed to send a letter he would point to it and say "MAIL" and when someone knocked on his door he would point to it and say "ENTER". Does anyone else remember that one?

ferguess_k4• 11 months ago

Asked ChatGPT and it told me the book might be "The Unix Programming Environment". It happens that the second link on Google is a pdf so I took a brief look, but did not find any cartoon. I asked it a second time and it said "UNIX for the Impatient", which does look like the one but I didn't find any pdf. Hopefully it helps.

RichardCA2• 11 months ago

Thanks but no, everyone who came up in that era knew about K&P (K&R was the C book). The main publishers back then were O'Reilly, SAMS, QUE and a few others. I think it was a SAMS book but I'm not sure.

A more likely candidate is the Kochan book but the original 1985 first edition. It had the scrappy sense of humor that characterized the Unix culture in the 80's.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/293206.UNIX_Shell_Progra...

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

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