Once upon a time I bought a copy of the Unix-Haters Handbook#

Wed, 12 Jun 2002 16:41:45 +0000

Once upon a time I bought a copy of the Unix-Haters Handbook. At the time I was the biggest Linux bigot I knew, and intended mostly to laugh at it - in fact, I mostly did. This Linux Gazette review gives you the flavour of my opinions.

As time went by and when I started thinking a little more rationally about operating systems (this change can be explained by one of more of (a) finding the alt.sysadmin.recovery newsgroup, or (b) finishing university and getting a real job) I grew to actually quite like my Unix-Haters handbook, even using it as a reference for that funky shell trick where you thought you needed $* but should have been using ${1+"$@"} or something instead. I retained my initial opinion that the funny bits were almost always the reprinted mailing list messages: Garfinkel's filler between them was, well, filler.

``${1+"$@"} or something ''? Yes, well. Somebody borrowed my copy from the office and didn't return it, and unhappily now it's out of print, I can't easily get another. But after recent conversations on IRC suggesting that they were still available, I found the actual list archives on the web: http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart/

Date: Fri, 14 Dec 1990 18:25-0500
From: GP
Subject: Re: MC:HUMOR;JARGON >
    Date: Fri, 14 Dec 1990 13:54 EST
    From: DH
    The JARGON file is being updated.  The guy doing so has
    changed the nasty references to Unix to refer to MS-DOS
    because "all the ITS partisans have now become Unix
    partisans, since the Unix philosophy is the same as the
    ITS philosophy." as he says.
Amazing!  A valid argument against gun control ...

"The guy doing so" presumably being Eric Raymond, I find this especially funny...