10-14-2002
The history of UNIX and the ideas behind it
Hi. I am new here, and this is my first post at the UNIX.com forums. I have read the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, and I noticed that neither UNIX nor Linux was mentioned once in the book. Why is this? What was UNIX's place in the early days of personal computers?
I realize that mainframes probably had proprietary operating systems specific to the manufacturer, or even the model of the computer. And it is also true that personal computers either had homebrewed operating systems or basic operating systems like Q-DOS or CP/M.
But what about UNIX? Where does that fit in? I've given it some thought, and it seems sensible that minicomputers (note that I refer to minicomputers as computers such as the PDP-8) might have used UNIX. It sounds like that would fit. Mainframe computers have their own proprietary operating system, minicomputers have a good operating system, such as UNIX, and UNIX probably won't fit on personal computers, so developers made homebrewed operating systems. Am I right?
Also, I have another question about the structure and basic ideas of UNIX. A small portion of the book Just for Fun, of which my copy is signed by Linus Torvalds, states that UNIX was a small-is-beautiful operating system. So I thought about how that would work. I would have the operating system take care of tasks such as the filesystem and the management of processes. But if thats roughly what UNIX does, what is Unix then? Is it just a central control station of the computer that manages processes, and manages the file system?
I also gave some thought about the notion of processes. Say I was making an operating system. I would either make a process for or integrate into the shell something like saving files and opening them. This process would take care of all of the stuff having to do with files. Maybe the file system itself would be embedded into the operating system, but this would not. Since it would be a modern operating system, it would seem sensible and convenient to not only add support for the hard drive, but for the floppy disk and the CD-ROM drive and CD-RW. I would want to have the desired effect of something like this:
> write E: doc1.txt, doc2.txt, doc3.tga, doc5.pdf
Even if this was a CD-RW, it would write the files to the E: drive. Would this be what a file i/o process would do, or would it have a special process for the floppy disk, the hard drive, and the CD-RW?
One last thing: in the shell sample I wrote above, write would be a command of the shell, and the word write would signal to start the process FILEio.exe with the parameters of E:, doc1.txt..., right?
I am sorry if I have bored you with my endless post. Thanks!
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LEARN ABOUT OSF1
mkmanifest
mkmanifest(1) General Commands Manual mkmanifest(1)
NAME
mkmanifest - mtools utility to create a shell script to restore UNIX file names from DOS
SYNOPSIS
mkmanifest [files]
OPTIONS
None
OPERANDS
A list of UNIX file names to be converted to DOS name format.
DESCRIPTION
The mkmanifest command creates a shell script that aids in the restore of UNIX file names that were overwritten by DOS file name restric-
tions. DOS file names are uppercase only, cannot exceed 8 character names, 3 character extensions and do not support device names or non-
alphanumeric characters.
Not all UNIX file names are supported in the DOS world. The mtools commands may have to change UNIX names to fit the DOS file name conven-
tions. Most commands provide the verbose option (-v), that displays new file names if they have been changed. The following table shows
some examples of file name conversions:
-----------------------------------------------
UNIX name DOS name Reason for the change
-----------------------------------------------
thisisatest THISISAT file name too long
file.stuff FILE.STU extension too long
prn.txt XRN.TXT PRN is a device name
.abc X.ABC null file name
hot+cold HOTXCOLD illegal character
-----------------------------------------------
EXIT STATUS
The following exit values are returned: Success. Failure.
EXAMPLES
Assume you have the following UNIX files that you want to copy to a DOS diskette using the mcopy command.
very_long_name 2.many.dots illegal: good.c prn.dev Capital
The mcopy command converts these file names to the following:
very_lon 2xmany.dot illegalx good.c xprn.dev capital
To restore the previous file names, use the mkmanifest command as follows: mkmanifest very_long_name 2.many.dots illegal:
good.c prn.dev Capital > manifest
The previous mkmanifest command line produces the following: mv very_lon very_long_name mv 2xmany.dot 2.many.dots mv illegalx illegal: mv
xprn.dev prn.dev mv capital Capital
The good.c file name did not require conversion, hence it was not included in the output.
If these files were copied from diskette to another UNIX system, and you wanted to restore the original names, retain a copy of the mani-
fest file (captured output) so that it can be used to convert the file names again.
FILES
Executable file
SEE ALSO
Commands: mcopy(1), mtools(1)
mkmanifest(1)