Subj : Re: Beautiful hacks
To   : HusTler
From : tenser
Date : Fri Nov 03 2023 01:04:04

On 01 Nov 2023 at 08:49p, HusTler pondered and said...
 
 Hu>  te> Steve Bourne used to keep a directory of zero-byte files that
 Hu>  te> were given names according to each representable 8-bit byte in
 Hu>  te> his account at Bell Labs.  This apparently was famous for
 Hu>  te> tripping up various naive scripts and tools that walked across
 Hu>  te> the filesystem
 Hu> 
 Hu> Ya mean the Linux guy?

No, Bourne probably uses Linux now, but this was in the early
Unix days.  Steve is famous (rightfully so) for writing the
Bourne shell, usually called "sh" (`/bin/sh` on Unix systems)
that was the default in 7th Edition Unix in 1978/9.  Bash, zsh,
ksh, etc, all largely retain the syntax he pioneered.

Fun fact: Bourne came from the UK, where he'd worked in Algol-68.
He wrote pre-processor macros that made the dialect of C he wrote
`sh` in look somewhat like Algol; this, and the version of
`finger.c` from 4.2BSD, became the inspirations for the International
Obfuscated C-Code Contest.  The syntax consumed by `sh` is somewhat
reminiscent of Algol, as well.

Here's a representative example of Bourne shell code:
https://tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/sh/cmd.c

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