In my GPN20 talk Moderne Linux Kommandozeilenwerkzeuge - Edition „Allein zu Haus” I referenced two UNIX features and their inception story. Of course I am too old to have been there myself, so let me give you the references to where I got those:

Ken Thompson in an interview with Brian Kernighan on their invention of pipes (Unix philosophy: „Expect the output of every program to become the input to another”) and how they had to clean up the code for it:

Youtube: VCF East 2019 – Brian Kernighan interviews Ken Thompson (32:48 Pipes)

Robert Pike took a look at the source code to explain dot-files came to be. As this was a Google+ post it is by now long gone, so I am copying it here (again):

Long ago, as the design of the Unix file system was being worked out, the entries . and .. appeared, to make navigation easier. I’m not sure but I believe .. went in during the Version 2 rewrite, when the file system became hierarchical (it had a very different structure early on). When one typed ls, however, these files appeared, so either Ken or Dennis added a simple test to the program. It was in assembler then, but the code in question was equivalent to something like this:

    if (name[0] == '.') continue;

This statement was a little shorter than what it should have been, which is

    if (strcmp(name, ".") == 0 || strcmp(name, "..") == 0) continue;

but hey, it was easy.

 
Two things resulted.

 
First, a bad precedent was set. A lot of other lazy programmers introduced bugs by making the same simplification. Actual files beginning with periods are often skipped when they should be counted.

 
Second, and much worse, the idea of a „hidden” or „dot” file was created. As a consequence, more lazy programmers started dropping files into everyone’s home directory. I don’t have all that much stuff installed on the machine I’m using to type this, but my home directory has about a hundred dot files and I don’t even know what most of them are or whether they’re still needed. Every file name evaluation that goes through my home directory is slowed down by this accumulated sludge.

 
I’m pretty sure the concept of a hidden file was an unintended consequence. It was certainly a mistake.

 
How many bugs and wasted CPU cycles and instances of human frustration (not to mention bad design) have resulted from that one small shortcut about 40 years ago?

 
Keep that in mind next time you want to cut a corner in your code.

 
(For those who object that dot files serve a purpose, I don’t dispute that but counter that it’s the files that serve the purpose, not the convention for their names. They could just as easily be in $HOME/cfg or $HOME/lib, which is what we did in Plan 9, which had no dot files. Lessons can be learned.)

Tagged as: command line, commandline, history, linux, terminal, unix, video | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Samstag, 20220604, 16:48 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)