Typographical Conventions xxxi Neuhaus, who saw the project through to its completion. Amy Pedersen was our Imprint Manager. The UNIX-HATERS cover was illustrated by Ken Copfelt of The Stock Illustration Source. Typographical Conventions In this book, we use this roman font for most of the text and a different sans serif font for the horror stories from the UNIX-HATERS mailing list. We’ve tried to put command names, where they appear, in bold, and the names of Unix system functions in italics. There’s also a courier font used for computer output, and we make it bold for information typed by the user. That’s it. This isn’t an unreadable and obscure computer manual with ten different fonts in five different styles. We hate computer manuals that look like they were unearthed with the rest of King Tut’s sacred artifacts. This book was typeset without the aid of troff, eqn, pic, tbl, yuc, ick, or any other idiotic Unix acronym. In fact, it was typeset using FrameMaker on a Macintosh, a Windows box, and a NeXTstation.

xxxii Preface The UNIX-HATERS Disclaimer In these days of large immoral corporations that compete on the basis of superior software patents rather than superior software, and that have no compunctions against suing innocent universities, we had better set a few things straight, lest they sic an idle lawyer on us: • It might be the case that every once in a while these companies allow a programmer to fix a bug rather than apply for a patent, so some of the more superficial problems we document in this book might not appear in a particular version of Unix from a particular supplier. That doesn’t really matter, since that same supplier probably intro- duced a dozen other bugs making the fix. If you can prove that no version of Unix currently in use by some innocent victim isn’t rid- dled with any of the problems that we mention in this volume, we’ll issue a prompt apology. • Inaccuracies may have crept into our narrative, despite our best intentions to keep them out. Don’t take our word for gospel for a particular flaw without checking your local Unix implementation. • Unix haters are everywhere. We are in the universities and the corporations. Our spies have been at work collecting embarrassing electronic memoranda. We don’t need the discovery phase of litigation to find the memo calculating that keeping the gas tank where it is will save $35 million annually at the cost of just eight lives. We’ve already got that memo. And others.