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

@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