Notices by awb (awb@mastodon.sdf.org)

Wrote some Tcl for the first time in decades and it feels like it should have been an easy alternative for many Shell scripts.

Perl dominated in the 1990s instead, because it was much closer to the typical Shell/sed/AWK script and between CPAN and cgi-bin it was extremely useful.

By the time Tcl was on par with Perl (late 1990s), Python started to become popular.

Tcl is quite pleasant to write though and people should give it a try (Tcl9 came out in 2024).

#shell #tcl #perl

@alanc Verified that /bin/sh on SVR3.2.2 behaves that way too.

#shell

@alanc Thank you for the clarification, I will update the blog post with that information soon!

I don't recall if I have actually used Solaris 11. The bulk of my hands-on Sun work was in the 1990s, so roughly SunOS 3.5 to Solaris 7 with a lot of systems on 4.1.x for many years (Solaris before 2.3 was a bit of a risky proposition.)

What happened to the SGML man-pages that were introduced in Solaris 7 and all that AnswerBook stuff? Is that still around in 11.4?

#unix #solaris

@alanc Right, man(1) in Solaris 7 could process nroff and SGML sources, IIRC.

I take it none of those XML pages or the toolchain are available externally? Are you doing anything with existing nroff or mandoc-formatted pages for external tools you ship?

Finally got around to writing a new blog post, this time on Unix manual pages. Turns out the history is complicated enough, that the actual man command will have to wait until the second part!

https://abochannek.github.io/utilities/2024/12/08/man-pages.html

Shout-out to everybody who went through the SunOS to Solaris transition, too. The shuffling of sections 4, 5, and 7 in SysV still annoys me thirty years later.

(Reposting with public visibility)

#unix #linux

Question for fellow Shell experts: Is there a POSIX-portable utility to find another user's home directory? I am looking for an alternative to ~user in scripts.

#shell #posix #linux #unix

Just for reference again here with public visibility. POSIX.1-2017 says:

"User Database

There are no references in POSIX.1-2017 to a "passwd file" or a "group file", and there is no requirement that the group or passwd databases be kept in files containing editable text."

#posix