x 2 Welcome, New User! ..................................................17 Like Russian Roulette with Six Bullets Loaded Cryptic Command Names ...........................................................18 Accidents Will Happen................................................................19 Consistently Inconsistent.............................................................26 Online Documentation ................................................................31 Error Messages and Error Checking, NOT! ................................31 The Unix Attitude........................................................................37 3 Documentation? ...............................................................43 What Documentation? On-line Documentation...............................................................44 This Is Internal Documentation? .................................................51 For Programmers, Not Users.......................................................54 Unix Without Words: A Course Proposal ...................................56 4 Mail..............................................................................................61 Don’t Talk to Me, I’m Not a Typewriter! Sendmail: The Vietnam of Berkeley Unix ..................................62 Subject: Returned Mail: User Unknown .....................................67 From: MAILER-DAEMON@berkeley.edu ...........................74 Apple Computer’s Mail Disaster of 1991....................................85 5 Snoozenet...............................................................................93 I Post, Therefore I Am Netnews and Usenet: Anarchy Through Growth ........................93 Newsgroups.................................................................................96 Alt.massive.flamage..................................................................100 This Information Highway Needs Information .........................100 rn, trn: You Get What You Pay for ............................................101 When in Doubt, Post .................................................................105 Seven Stages of Snoozenet........................................................106

xi 6 Terminal Insanity ..........................................................111 Curses! Foiled Again! Original Sin ...............................................................................111 The Magic of Curses .................................................................114 7 The X-Windows Disaster ......................................123 How to Make a 50-MIPS Workstation Run Like a 4.77MHz IBM PC X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster..........................124 X Myths.....................................................................................127 X Graphics: Square Peg in a Round Hole .................................141 X: On the Road to Nowhere ......................................................142 Part 2: Programmer’s System?.................145 8 csh, pipes, and find ......................................................147 Power Tools for Power Fools The Shell Game.........................................................................148 Shell Programming....................................................................155 Pipes ..........................................................................................161 Find............................................................................................166 9 Programming ....................................................................173 Hold Still, This Won’t Hurt a Bit The Wonderful Unix Programming Environment.....................175 Programming in Plato’s Cave....................................................176 “It Can’t Be a Bug, My Makefile Depends on It!”....................186 If You Can’t Fix It, Restart It! ...................................................198