Post #2862253

2025-10-12 20:55 UTC

@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social we feel this SO HARD this week. it is no longer possible to find answers to trivial technical questions with a web search. we're very grateful we have a curated personal library of authoritative reference material, but a lot of key Unix ideas are socially-defined and not formally documented anywhere.... (for example, just now we were trying to remember the semantics of when chown is allowed, and the rationale for it)

Replies (2)

@wakame@tech.lgbt 2025-10-12 21:55

@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @richpuchalsky@mastodon.social [off on a tangent...] I wonder if, for some technical systems, we could assume that we got incorrect information if the answer is "too neat". (For example, my pet peeve: The number of dashes for different Unix commands. find / --name '*.sh' "Wait. Two dashes? I now have docs for 10 programs who have consistent syntax. That is highly unlikely.")

Open ##2862254
@cks@mastodon.social 2025-10-13 02:02

@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space One place to look for this sort of thing is the 'rationale' sections of POSIX/Single Unix Specification, which is actually online (for now), eg https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/functions/chown.html This is unhelpful for chown() because it points to V7 and V7 has what could be called 'a vague justification' in its manual page as I discovered in 2020¹ and then forgot until part-way through writing an earlier version of this toot. ¹ https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ChownDivideAndQuotas

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