Brian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On 7 Dec 2007 at 12:01, David Kastrup wrote: >> Alexander Terekhov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> >>> David Kastrup wrote: >>> >>> [... crying revisionism ...] >>> >>> Dear GNUtian dak, please visit >> >> Why change the topic? We were talking about a dedicated Linux site >> which called Linux "a clone of the operating system Unix" and said >> that this operating system clone was created by Linux Torvalds from >> scratch even though the term "Unix" certainly comprises more than just >> a kernel. > > But you'd have to agree that user-space utilities like cat and wc are > essentially trivial, in a way that a kernel isn't trivial.
The last time I looked, user space utilities like gcc, ld, gdb, awk, sed, bash and a few hundred others were not quite trivial. Apart from which: Usage: cat [OPTION] [FILE]... Concatenate FILE(s), or standard input, to standard output. -A, --show-all equivalent to -vET -b, --number-nonblank number nonblank output lines -e equivalent to -vE -E, --show-ends display $ at end of each line -n, --number number all output lines -s, --squeeze-blank never more than one single blank line -t equivalent to -vT -T, --show-tabs display TAB characters as ^I -u (ignored) -v, --show-nonprinting use ^ and M- notation, except for LFD and TAB --help display this help and exit --version output version information and exit With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input. Which is also not all of trivial when compared to some kernel functionality. I mean, take the "fork" system call. Before all that copy-on-write nonsense was invented, it just consisted of swapping out a process without actually terminating the in-memory copy. A UNIX kernel fit into something like 16kB or so on a PDP-11. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss