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Sometimes I daydream about a parallel universe in which the designers of Unix decided on record-oriented IO instead of stream-oriented IO. I would attack you w
by b112 3y ago
Sometimes I daydream about a parallel universe in which the designers of Unix decided on record-oriented IO instead of stream-oriented IO.
I would attack you with tea bags and waxed paper, if you tried to alter the timeline, and make this so.
On the other hand, I would happily sing your praises, if you invented another kind of pipe, to your specs, it sounds like a great additional.
Imagine combining the two, in one series of commands!
- skissane 3y ago> On the other hand, I would happily sing your praises, if you invented another kind of pipe, to your specs, it sounds like a great additional Already exists - Unix domain sockets. Some shells (in particular some versions of ksh) use them to implement pipes. And, on some platforms (Linux yes, but I think maybe not macOS???) Unix domain sockets support record-oriented operation (SOCK_SEQPACKET). The problem is that for it to work you don’t just need the kernel to support it and the shell to use it, you also need all the utilities to support it too-that’s a big ask. The idea has been implemented on IBM mainframes (CMS pipelines aka Hartmann pipelines). But that’s a radically different platform, and IBM has never tried porting that to a non-mainframe platform, and nobody has ever sought to directly clone it (although stuff like PowerShell and NuShell share some of its ideas, albeit none of the details)
- b112 3y agoHmm. Shame it never caught on in the OSS/GNU world. Thanks for the FYI.