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When I read this 20 years ago I would never have believed I'd be typing this on a Mac laptop running yet another Unix variant. This line is now so funny... As

When I read this 20 years ago I would never have believed I'd be typing this on a Mac laptop running yet another Unix variant. This line is now so funny... As for me? I switched to the Mac. No more grep, no more piping, no more SED scripts. Just a simple, elegant life: “Your application has unexpectedly quit due to error number –1. OK?”

ptero 10y ago
You beat me to that respose! The book is a great fun to read. I read it in grad school 20 years ago (where Unix was the only option if you wanted to write your articles in TeX) and re-read it with much pleasure today (when 75% of my computer time is spent, by choice, on Linux variants)
problems 10y ago
How does one use a Mac without grep or piping? I bought a macbook thinking I'd learn how to use it... but after 3 years, all I can do on a Mac is open a web browser and terminal.
- Gracana 10y ago
  This book was written long before Mac OS X.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    I thought OSX was a weird Mach/BSD amalgam. In which case, not so much.
    - nwordsam3 10y ago
      I don't follow. When the book was written it was System 7 days. That's about as far removed from UNIX as you can get. This book was also before Linux was really on the radar outside of enthusiasts. You'd get 386BSD on a CD-ROM, FreeBSD was just released by Walnut Creek. This book was mostly a response to the absolutely atrocious landscape of commercial UNIX... the catalyst for Windows NT tremendous success.
- BatFastard 10y ago
  As most developers do. Most everything else a pain in the Asteroid.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > How does one use a Mac without grep or piping? Using Finder, XCode, Objective-C and Swift frameworks,...
  - problems 10y ago
    Bluh, don't get me started on Finder. Icons in directories would randomly be overlapping just because I hadn't been in them in a while and new files were added, they added this weird tagging system with colors that just doesn't make sense to me at all, it randomly thinks I want to view some sort of "recently used files and some random shit" list instead of my homedir. I don't know what the devs of it were thinking. Even bone stock Windows Explorer seems better. Easier to understand what's going on at least. I don't know why people seem to think Apple is some sort of UI god when they can't even make a usable file manager. Objective-C looks like a clusterfuck and I never want to touch it. Swift seems like a quite good solution to that and I hope it eventually becomes the full replacement - but now more non-Apple laptops have high DPI screens, so I don't think I'll be around to see it happen.
    - DonHopkins 10y ago
      From day one, they should have called it the "Loser" instead of the "Finder".
      - seanp2k2 10y ago
        for anyone unaware, mdfind foo on Mac does the same as locate foo on Linux. CLI spotlight search. Also, open bar will open a thing (file, folder, application, whatever) in the associated application. I typically do open . to pop a finder if I want a GUI to mess with files in the current dir.
    - rileymat2 10y ago
      I completely agree with you, the "All My Files" view that it defaults to seems to not fit me very well. The nice thing is that it is configurable.
    - dahart 10y ago
dahart 10y ago
Ha! I switched to Mac so I could have pipes, grep and bash. I personally believe a big reason for the Mac resurgence has to do with the switch to UNIX. I was on Windows using Cygwin for years before anyone I knew was using a Mac. Then OSX came out, and all of a sudden all the academics I knew switched to Mac, and a couple years later most of the professional programmers I knew had switched. The great thing about a Mac is that I get to have my user level UNIX without having to know anything about the system level UNIX. I don't need to be a sysadmin to run the thing. I get grep and pipes without having to know all the crazy commands to tweak networks settings and display timings and boot scripts. When OSX came out, that was the state of Linux, you couldn't be just a user of it, you had to know way too much to get it running.
- henrik_w 10y ago
  Agree! A real relief to get a proper Unix shell after getting by with Cygwin.
- jackhammons 10y ago
  Have you tried the Windows Subsystem for Linux?
  - TheGRS 10y ago
    Not OP, but I'm genuinely interested in how this experience is. What do you think of it compared to using, say, iTerm2 on OSX? I've been thinking of switching back to a Windows PC since I haven't been very impressed by OSX in the last couple of years.
    - hermitdev 10y ago
      I've been using it since it's release to the fast insider ring and at work since it's release to the slow insider ring. It does everything I need to do. Build C++ with GCC or clang. ssh client works fine (have not tried ssh server, but supposedly supported). Python, Perl work fine. Have had some UI issues with the console, but those have been fixed on the fast ring. The team behind WSL is also very responsive to issues reported at github.
jdblair 10y ago
I switch back to Mac from Linux so I could have grep, pipes, sed and all the UNIX stuff alongside real commercial applications like Word, Excel and Photoshop. The irony is now I run Linux in a VM because the toolchains for the embedded work I do all run there. In principle I can make it all work in MacOS, but it already works in Linux.
dualogy 10y ago
> No more grep, no more piping, no more SED scripts Fedora/Gnome here. I never use this sort of stuff, and modern power users really don't have to. That's why I categorically state that practically no-one in the real world "uses Unix", even though most OS-es incl mainstream mobile ones derive directly or indirectly from it, save for Windows and esoteric ones. Do I enjoy modern Linux? Heck yeah. Do I want to use Unix? Piping and grepping and cat'ing and touch'ing and so forth? It's not rocket science but it's also a doggerel not smooth UX for me, and "not smooth" means not productive. If I need to compose functionality for "shell"-based task automation, I whip up a small Go program. Portable across OSes should I ever move, bin dir is in PATH, compiles fast enough to not need script interpreter for iterating the "script" (tool) at hand, and the syntax and semantics are saner to me than sh scripts, aka no impedance mismatch vs other coding tasks. (Sure enough though, for one-offs "search these for that" while already in the bash/etc, the built-in old-school tools still come in handy occasionally)
- xorblurb 10y ago
  If grepping and piping is not productive for you, you are simply doing tasks that do not require that to be productive. OTOH working on some non-trivial code bases, maybe including system level code, typically requires grepping and piping, for at least some developers of the team, to be productive. I too don't gratuitously use cat and touch and grep when I don't need to. I even less often use cmd stuff under Windows (using one of the dozen of bash that exists there is better for interactive command line use, when needed, on computers where I can have those), but if I need to I can do it. Do I use Unix or not when I'm not typing into a traditional command line shell, but still using a Unix-based system as my direct terminal (or a light terminal connected to it)? "Interesting" question. Do I use an internal combustion engine when I'm driving a car? Do I use electricity when I switch on the light? I don't think we can answer any of those questions in a truly absolute way. But most of the time I would probably say yes.

ptero 10y ago

You beat me to that respose! The book is a great fun to read. I read it in grad school 20 years ago (where Unix was the only option if you wanted to write your articles in TeX) and re-read it with much pleasure today (when 75% of my computer time is spent, by choice, on Linux variants)

problems 10y ago

How does one use a Mac without grep or piping? I bought a macbook thinking I'd learn how to use it... but after 3 years, all I can do on a Mac is open a web browser and terminal.

Gracana 10y ago
This book was written long before Mac OS X.
- mcguire 10y ago
  I thought OSX was a weird Mach/BSD amalgam. In which case, not so much.
  - nwordsam3 10y ago
    I don't follow. When the book was written it was System 7 days. That's about as far removed from UNIX as you can get. This book was also before Linux was really on the radar outside of enthusiasts. You'd get 386BSD on a CD-ROM, FreeBSD was just released by Walnut Creek. This book was mostly a response to the absolutely atrocious landscape of commercial UNIX... the catalyst for Windows NT tremendous success.
BatFastard 10y ago
As most developers do. Most everything else a pain in the Asteroid.
pjmlp 10y ago
> How does one use a Mac without grep or piping? Using Finder, XCode, Objective-C and Swift frameworks,...
- problems 10y ago
  Bluh, don't get me started on Finder. Icons in directories would randomly be overlapping just because I hadn't been in them in a while and new files were added, they added this weird tagging system with colors that just doesn't make sense to me at all, it randomly thinks I want to view some sort of "recently used files and some random shit" list instead of my homedir. I don't know what the devs of it were thinking. Even bone stock Windows Explorer seems better. Easier to understand what's going on at least. I don't know why people seem to think Apple is some sort of UI god when they can't even make a usable file manager. Objective-C looks like a clusterfuck and I never want to touch it. Swift seems like a quite good solution to that and I hope it eventually becomes the full replacement - but now more non-Apple laptops have high DPI screens, so I don't think I'll be around to see it happen.
  - DonHopkins 10y ago
    From day one, they should have called it the "Loser" instead of the "Finder".
    - seanp2k2 10y ago
      for anyone unaware, mdfind foo on Mac does the same as locate foo on Linux. CLI spotlight search. Also, open bar will open a thing (file, folder, application, whatever) in the associated application. I typically do open . to pop a finder if I want a GUI to mess with files in the current dir.
  - rileymat2 10y ago
    I completely agree with you, the "All My Files" view that it defaults to seems to not fit me very well. The nice thing is that it is configurable.
  - dahart 10y ago

dahart 10y ago

Ha! I switched to Mac so I could have pipes, grep and bash. I personally believe a big reason for the Mac resurgence has to do with the switch to UNIX. I was on Windows using Cygwin for years before anyone I knew was using a Mac. Then OSX came out, and all of a sudden all the academics I knew switched to Mac, and a couple years later most of the professional programmers I knew had switched. The great thing about a Mac is that I get to have my user level UNIX without having to know anything about the system level UNIX. I don't need to be a sysadmin to run the thing. I get grep and pipes without having to know all the crazy commands to tweak networks settings and display timings and boot scripts. When OSX came out, that was the state of Linux, you couldn't be just a user of it, you had to know way too much to get it running.

henrik_w 10y ago
Agree! A real relief to get a proper Unix shell after getting by with Cygwin.
jackhammons 10y ago
Have you tried the Windows Subsystem for Linux?
- TheGRS 10y ago
  Not OP, but I'm genuinely interested in how this experience is. What do you think of it compared to using, say, iTerm2 on OSX? I've been thinking of switching back to a Windows PC since I haven't been very impressed by OSX in the last couple of years.
  - hermitdev 10y ago
    I've been using it since it's release to the fast insider ring and at work since it's release to the slow insider ring. It does everything I need to do. Build C++ with GCC or clang. ssh client works fine (have not tried ssh server, but supposedly supported). Python, Perl work fine. Have had some UI issues with the console, but those have been fixed on the fast ring. The team behind WSL is also very responsive to issues reported at github.

jdblair 10y ago

I switch back to Mac from Linux so I could have grep, pipes, sed and all the UNIX stuff alongside real commercial applications like Word, Excel and Photoshop. The irony is now I run Linux in a VM because the toolchains for the embedded work I do all run there. In principle I can make it all work in MacOS, but it already works in Linux.

dualogy 10y ago

> No more grep, no more piping, no more SED scripts Fedora/Gnome here. I never use this sort of stuff, and modern power users really don't have to. That's why I categorically state that practically no-one in the real world "uses Unix", even though most OS-es incl mainstream mobile ones derive directly or indirectly from it, save for Windows and esoteric ones. Do I enjoy modern Linux? Heck yeah. Do I want to use Unix? Piping and grepping and cat'ing and touch'ing and so forth? It's not rocket science but it's also a doggerel not smooth UX for me, and "not smooth" means not productive. If I need to compose functionality for "shell"-based task automation, I whip up a small Go program. Portable across OSes should I ever move, bin dir is in PATH, compiles fast enough to not need script interpreter for iterating the "script" (tool) at hand, and the syntax and semantics are saner to me than sh scripts, aka no impedance mismatch vs other coding tasks. (Sure enough though, for one-offs "search these for that" while already in the bash/etc, the built-in old-school tools still come in handy occasionally)

xorblurb 10y ago
If grepping and piping is not productive for you, you are simply doing tasks that do not require that to be productive. OTOH working on some non-trivial code bases, maybe including system level code, typically requires grepping and piping, for at least some developers of the team, to be productive. I too don't gratuitously use cat and touch and grep when I don't need to. I even less often use cmd stuff under Windows (using one of the dozen of bash that exists there is better for interactive command line use, when needed, on computers where I can have those), but if I need to I can do it. Do I use Unix or not when I'm not typing into a traditional command line shell, but still using a Unix-based system as my direct terminal (or a light terminal connected to it)? "Interesting" question. Do I use an internal combustion engine when I'm driving a car? Do I use electricity when I switch on the light? I don't think we can answer any of those questions in a truly absolute way. But most of the time I would probably say yes.