Reference. {UNIX} Programmer's Manual, Seventh Edition [unix7thmanual]

1979

Abstract

1979

Backlinks

Weekly 2026 w39 [weekly-2026-w39]

September 30, 2026
Patrick Ferris

Shells

September 30, 2026
Patrick Ferris

Work on the msh paper continued this week. One interesting result (for an appendix) was seeing what were the most commonly used commands in the Dockerfile dataset:

Which again, leads to some notion of overkill in terms of using a shell as the means to create container images when all we do is move some files around and install packages! I'm wondering if we're missing a real opportunity to streamline this process via something like the package calculus -- a package manager-agnostic means for declaring your dependencies.

Embed that as a programmable notion in your container image language alongside a container image-aware HTTP GET tool (to replace a vast majority of curl calls) and a handful of busybox commands, and you are left with (nearly) the raw shell only being used for the long tail of domain-specific things (e.g. invoking a build system).

Joy in old documents

September 30, 2026
Patrick Ferris

I'll talk about the joy I found in reading some historical bits and bobs tracking down information about shells, containers and operating systems more generally.

Part of this archaeological effort was trying to find when CHROOT was introduced into UNIX. Various online tools, including AI summaries, point to UNIX v7 but the system call is not obviously defined there. A bit more digging reveals it is listed under CHDIR(2) and not on its own.

Anyway, flicking through the manual was somewhat of a joy. The preface reads:

This new form of the Seventh Edition manual attests to the gratifying popularity of the UNIX Operating System. Delivered with no support and with an amateurishly published manual, this elegant and productive system has nevertheless earned worldwide respect, sometimes bordering on adulation...
Thousands of users today work from faint reproductions of reproductions of the original manual, whose ragged pages dangle and slide out of beat-up ring binders...

This bordering-on-poetic prose reminds me of some passages written for the MULTICS manual too (which I have talked about before).

All to say, I'm often thinking about the importance of writing these days and injecting some personality into it.

Part II Discussions

September 30, 2026
Patrick Ferris

I am hopefully going to supervise a part II project this year either on a fun ergonomic frontend to eBPF programs or a new spin on the geospatial DSL. More to follow once things are finalised.

Upstreaming Forester Pretty-printer

September 30, 2026
Patrick Ferris

I finally got around to upstreaming the Forester pretty-printing API I have been using in Graft. This allows you to print, hopefully, syntactically correct Forester code directly from the AST (a Code.t in forester parlance).

Happily, this all took place on tangled. It will be nice to keep this updated alongside Forester and point Graft to it. It feels like many people are moving away from a community-oriented model of software development, instead building a hybrid bazaarian cathedral monorepo powered by AI. I'm not here to really say what is right and what is wrong, but it seems to me that the sense of community is fragmenting and undue stress is being placed on many maintainers who no longer enjoy their job.

New release of ppx_deriving_ [ppx_deriving_yamlx-release]

September 30, 2026
Patrick Ferris

Raphael has proposed a new yamlx backend for ppx_deriving_yaml. It seems Ahrefs have been using his patch. I rejigged that PR to parameterise ppx_deriving_yaml over a small set of constructors and patterns so that the core codec logic could be reused.

I am fairly pleased with this abstraction. It allows any data format that supports objects and list to reuse the codec. For example, it would be trivial now to add a ppx_deriving_cbor.