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Little known random Brian Kernighan facts: * He joined Princeton’s CS department in 2000 but taught at least one class there as early as 1993 while still at Be
by gregw2 2y ago
Little known random Brian Kernighan facts:
* He joined Princeton’s CS department in 2000 but taught at least one class there as early as 1993 while still at Bell Labs Research (on sabbatical?)
* One of his students regularly brought a 386sx laptop (running pre-1.0 Linux) to class and when Brian was asked more obscure questions about what awk did which he couldn’t remember, the student would run commands in awk and feed Brian the definitive implementation answer. So Brian had some exposure to Linux moderately early on.
* Here’s a writeup from him on putting AT&T’s toll free phone directory on the internet back in fall 1994: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/800.html https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/800.html
- smitty1e 2y ago> One of his students Smells like the post author, no?
- Affric 2y agoIs gawk the definitive awk implementation or am I thinking of gsed being the one that’s really different?
- LukeShu 2y agoI'm not sure what you're thinking of, but there at least 3 prominent and still-relevant awk implementations: nawk (One True Awk / AT&T awk / BWK awk): the original awk, still maintained; is used by macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk mawk (Mike's awk): the default awk on Debian https://invisible-island.net/mawk/ https://invisible-island.net/mawk/ gawk (GNU awk): the default awk in lots of other places https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/
- gregw2 2y agoThere were some differences even in the mid 90s between AT&T-style awk which was then considered the original/definitive/most-backward-compatible and gawk which was new/shiny (although not /that/ new). I believe both were available in Linux back then. I believe in the above anecdote both were consulted with the emphasis on AT&T-style awk for obvious reasons.