UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm getting curious about making some of my own commands. I know this is realtively easy with script files and combining various unix standard commands. Is there a way to view the code that is used for these standard commands..i.e. how do I see what code is used for the 'join' command.

I'm led to understand that Linux is open source - but I'm looking at what I have to work with professionally - which is Unix (SunOS 5.6). Is it possible....and would I be freaked at the code used....because one would reason that you couldn't use unix to write the base level unix commands!

I am not a programmer, but I believe most of those "standard" commands (not the machine dependant kernel code, necessarily though) are written in C - you shouldn't have too hard a time making your own, or modifying an existing.

You may have luck with Solaris source, though - see this article:
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19991001S0004

There isn't much that I could find on the Sun site about this just yet, though. Just this page: http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/source/

On the other hand, you can browse the source for GNU tools by downloading the appropriate package from the ftp://ftp.gnu.org archive. It can get tricky, though, since it's packaged. For example, the "join" command would be found in the "textutils" packages, along with other commands...

Another alternative that people forget about is the BSD project. You can browse the FreeBSD source via a CVS web interface, found here: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/
I believe similar method exist for Open and Net BSDs, although I haven't checked.

Hope this helps.

OpenBSD has a WebCVS feature as well located at http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/. NetBSD's can be found at http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/.