I'm a UNIX systems administrator, computer scientist, philosopher, historian and enthusiast of Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and science. My main areas of research and interest are: FreeBSD operating system, HP-UX and HP technologies (I'm certified HP-UX CSE, HP MASE and member of DSPP and Connect), SSI clusters, First Principles (arche) of the ancients, hylomorphism, philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, Pythagoreanism, Arabian and Renaissance magic and natural philosophy. I'm also family related to John "Mook" Gibbons, one of the founders of the Wu-Tang Clan, and done quite a lot of work for some artists under the Wu banner serving mainly as a technical architect.
The UNIX philosophy - UNIX as a literature
UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity. --Dennis Ritchie
UNIX was designed as a simple, portable, multi-tasking and multi-user time-sharing operating system. It is characterized by various core concepts: the use of plain text for storing data; a hierarchical file system; treating everything as files; and the use of a large number of software tools, small programs that can be put together through a command line interpreter (shell) using pipes.
Its mastery involves much more than pure technical computing skills. That's why in the past experienced UNIX programmers were called wizards. The love of UNIX, so tightly connected with a command line interface (CLI) and text in general, is really the love of words, literature and language. Most UNIX enthusiasts are adept readers and writers, expressing their deep appreciation for the written word.
UNIX programmers express themselves in a rich vocabulary of system utilities and command line arguments, along with a flexible, varied grammar and syntax. For UNIX enthusiasts, the language becomes second nature. The text--on the command line, STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR--is the primary interface mechanism: UNIX system utilities are a sort of Lego construction set for wordsmiths. Pipes and filters connect one utility to the next, text flows invisibly between. Working with a shell, awk/lex derivatives, or the utility set is literally a word dance. --Thomas Scoville
Riddlers, like poets, imitate God by creating their own cosmos; they re-create through words, making familiar objects into something completely new, re-arranging the parts of pieces of things to produce creatures with strange combinations of arms, legs, eyes and mouths. --Ruth Wehlau
There is no literature or even words without letters and mathematics. And this forms the alphabet -- one of the most important achievement of humanity.
Some god or divine man, who in the Egyptian legend is said to have been Thoth, observing that the human voice was infinite, first distinguished in this infinity a certain number of vowels, and then other letters which had sound, but were not pure vowels (i.e., the semivowels); these too exist in a definite number; and lastly, he distinguished a third class of letters which we now call mutes, without voice and without sound, and divided these, and likewise the two other classes of vowels and semivowels, into the individual sounds, and told the number of them, and gave to each and all of them the name of letters; and observing that none of us could learn any one of them and not learn them all, and in consideration of this common bond which in a manner united them, he assigned to them all a single art, and this he called the art of grammar or letters. --Plato
But it is much more than that. UNIX and C programming language are a deep and esoterical science of words and numbers. Its roots are in the ancient philosophical systems like Pythagorean's science of numbers and Jewish Kabbalah.
There exists an occult and sacred alphabet which the Hebrews attribute to Enoch, the Egyptians to Thoth or to Hermes Trismegistus, the Greeks to Cadmus and to Palamedes. This alphabet was known to the followers of Pythagoras, and is composed of absolute ideas attached to signs and numbers; by its combinations, it realizes the mathematics of thought. Solomon represented this alphabet by seventy-two names, written upon thirty-six talismans. Eastern initiates still call these the "little keys" or clavicles of Solomon. These keys are described, and their use explained, in a book the source of whose traditional dogma is the patriarch Abraham. This book is called the Sepher Yetzirah; with the aid of the Sepher Yetzirah one can penetrate the hidden sense of the Zohar, the great dogmatic treatise of the Kabbalah of the Hebrews. --Eliphas Levi
In its commitment to the pure textual interface, UNIX is also similar to computer interactive literature known as Interactive Fiction. Excitement of exploring a virtual world, a world of imagination, solving interesting problems along the way, conversation with a machine - all those things UNIX and Interactive Fiction games share with each other. Because what is the difference between exploring a dungeon in Zork and traversing through directories in a UNIX filesystem? The power that made Interactive Fiction so popular is also in effect in the UNIX world.
The northern "wall" of the room is a shimmering curtain of light. In the center of the room is a large stone cube, about 10 feet on a side. Engraved on the side of the cube is some lettering. --Zork 2
The UNIX philosophy - UNIX as an occult science
These are the principal doctrines that ought to be acknowledged by one who will be prudent. The first of these is one about the gods: that they are. One of the gods is Zeus, the supreme sovereign, both the greatest and the best that it is possible to be. He is set over this whole order and singular in highest divinity. He is himself being in its entirety and completely ungenerated; both father and highest creator of all the other gods. His eldest child, also motherless, and second god is Poseidon. Secondary matters have been entrusted by Zeus to him as master of all the things below; and, moreover, Poseidon is the origin and creator of the heavens here. He uses the other gods as coadjutors, as brothers, all motherless supercelestials--these include both the Olympians and the Tartareans. He himself then begot from Hera, a goddess productive of the matter, other gods within the heavens, both the celestial offspring of the stars and then the chthonian offspring of the spirits who are close to us by nature. Who even in Helios, the eldest of his own children, he placed his trust as the master of the heavens here, and, moreover, Helios is the source of the mortal things in it. Nevertheless, he achieves this with Kronos, he who is one of the Tartarean Titans and their leader. The Tartareans are different from the Olympian gods. The Olympians are the creators and rulers of the immortals in the heavens, but the Tartareans rule the mortals here; so that Kronos of the Tartareans, himself the leader of the Titans, rules over the mortal form altogether. Hera, appointed second after Poseidon among the Olympians, is the creator and ruler of the highest matter, itself indestructible. She did this for the things made with Poseidon himself. Poseidon himself rules the entire form of both the immortal and the mortal. He is the master in the universe. He himself has truly ordained the whole order. Since Zeus, alone in the singularity of his highest divinity, rules apart over the universe. Let this then be the first doctrine that one is to understand and believe. --George Gemistos Plethon
The word occult comes from the Latin word occultus meaning hidden or secret. Occult science is a term referring to the science reserved for the few, hidden for the multitudes, which requires dedication and discipline. George Gemistos, who called himself Plethon, (1355?-1452) lived during the last years of the Byzantine empire. Constantinople fell to the Turks less than one year after his death. Yet he had a significant, direct influence on the study of Plato in the Latin West. This resulted from his membership in the Byzantine delegation to the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438-39.
This above quote comes from his "Summary of the Doctrines of Zoroaster and Plato" which was preserved on a manuscript by Plethon's student Bessarion. One who is familiar with the occult philosophy will recognize immediately that under a veil of Greek gods Plethon is describing the perennial wisdom of Plato. Such sublime occult theologies were not uncommon amongst the ancients. Veiling philosophical ideas in arcane and obscure language was always the domain of mysteries and religious myths. And interpretation of such ancient myths was the start of philosophical thinking. Even though the terminology employed by various platonic sages was different, the essential meaning remained consistent.
Going back to the tradition of the sages of the past, I present to a modern reader an interpretation of Plato's hylomorphism which is described in the modern computer science terminology. It draws heavily upon the ancient sources such as Plato's Philebus, Timaeus, and Philolaus' fragments, Aristotle, Numenius, Plotinus and Leibniz. It is really the source of modern computer science.
Bit 1 - peras, limited, finite, odd, one, light, true, it is, first god, father, good, active, positive, form, idea, sun, man, sand (hot-dry)
Bit 0 - apeiron, unlimited, infinite, even, many, darkness, false, it is not, goddess, mother, evil, passive, negative, prime matter, hyle, space (chaos), moon, woman, water (cold-wet)
Byte - koinon, ordered mixture of both, harmony, third god, soul, child
There still remains an open question as to where in this scheme of things is the place for the Demiurge, the cause of mixture, architect, second god and nous. Plato argued that it is the divine craftsman who designs and implements everything -- imposes form upon matter. Without the intelligent master there would be no order, no harmony in the mixture of peras and apeiron. It would just be a lump of unordered elements. The harmonious compound is like a delicious meal or drink. Each element in it must be in its proper place.
The world's nature is a harmonious compound of infinite and finite elements; similar is the totality of the world in itself, and of all it contains. --Philolaus
Character (byte) in computing is such a mixture of form (1) and matter (0). Computers represent characters using a character encoding that assigns each character to something -- an integer quantity represented by an ordered sequence of bits -- byte. It is finite because the form must be a finite element, must have its boundaries to be a form; but at the same time it possesses also an infinite element -- matter. Form and matter together create a substance, something visible and tangible. So the miracles of byte can be performed only with binary mathematics -- two opposing elements that harmoniously work with each other creating a harmony.
UNIX and its love for the numbers, characters and text, is the most beautiful embodiment of the ideas of old philosophers. Every file existing within a file system is really an inode which is 256 bytes in UFS2, even an empty file (0 byte file). You can't have a physical file without an inode which is 256 bytes, so the byte (combination of 1's and 0's) is in reality the basic building block of existence. No one can separate those two elements from a byte, so they would be different physical entities -- they are one. So the byte is at the same time one and many and it is ruled by mathematical proportion and harmony. And only mathematics is able to decipher its meanings.
Information Technology based on binary mathematics is really an extension and continuation of ancient pythagorean notions of peras and apeiron. The three kinds of Philolaus and Plato: peras, apeiron and koinon are the basis of computing. With them we can achieve really spectacular things we all see around us. Binary code is indeed the universal language of nature as Leibniz was elaborately describing in his works. My system which is based on bits and bytes in computing environments is really the microcosm of what nature is doing on a much larger scale.
FreeBSD - UNIX with a heritage
We use FreeBSD exclusively for f-root (in 45 cities now, usually with three servers per city) and all of our other servers and internal development. We like the age of the platform. BSD has existed since the late 1970's and modern FreeBSD is extremely refined and mature. --Paul Vixie
FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible, amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon64, and EM64T), UltraSPARC, IA-64, PC-98 and ARM architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. more
On x86 architecture I work primarily with FreeBSD, because to put it simple it is the best system out there (I also work heavily with HP-UX on PA-RISC and Itanium). It is free, open, reliable, logical, simple and beautiful. Working with it is a pure joy for the soul. Everything in FreeBSD just seems to be consistent and reasonable. No other system has its history so tied to the academic circles and real computer scientists going back to the early days of Bell Labs UNIX. Many high profile companies today use FreeBSD on their production servers. Just ask Yahoo! or Juniper Networks.
I'm a FreeBSD Contributor and the author of bpkg, which is a tool written in sh(1) for quickly displaying a lot of interesting information about ports. For example, with just one flag you can display 10 most recently installed ports:
Doing it "the ordinary way" you would have to type:
Or I can just check with one command which version of specified port is available as a package:
ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-7-stable/Latest/
nmap-i18n-man -> nmap-i18n-man-4.76.20081109.tbz 656.7K [May 13 08:08]
nmap -> nmap-4.85.b7_1.tbz 1.2M [May 12 13:11]
If you want to try bpkg in your FreeBSD environment, just issue as root:
And don't forget to read a man page:
The standard text editor
Computer scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem> ed--- Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity. --Patrick J. LoPresti
?
help
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
UNIX was from the very start a perfect medium to manipulate words, numbers and text. Historically line-oriented editing was the standard for interactive computing. In today's world of windows-based environments and GUI, it is still the fastest and most efficient method to edit text. The original User Interface to the UNIX Operating System was the actual ASR-33 TeleType, literally printing the user output line by line onto a roll of paper. Completely line-oriented and very slow. There was no screen editor vi(1) yet; ed(1) was indeed the standard and most of the early UNIX source code was written with it.
Line oriented editing remains still the most elegant and brilliant way to edit a text file without losing any information from a screen. Vi(1) is very nice in most situations, but sometimes a simple precise sed(1) statement, or ed(1) can do the job perfectly.
I'm used to having a 24-line terminal with no ability to scroll back. The reason I use ed is that I don't want to lose what's on the screen. --Bill Joy
Always try to use the best and most efficient tool for the job. In time you will learn that the most simple UNIX tools are more powerful than your big and bloated editor of choice. They are also incredible fast and flexible. You can accomplish even very complex task much faster using less resources. Do not be fooled by thinking that your big and bloated editor can do much more because it's full of features. In the end those "features" become obstacles. Line oriented editing will always remain the top choice for professionals who want to quickly and efficiently work in the UNIX environment.
The path of a UNIX sage is not an easy one. Following in the footsteps of our ancestors you need to read and understand how UNIX operates, and in order to do that you really need to master how to manipulate text in the CLI.
There are many people who use UNIX or Linux who IMHO do not understand UNIX. UNIX is not just an operating system, it is a way of doing things, and the shell plays a key role by providing the glue that makes it work. The UNIX methodology relies heavily on reuse of a set of tools rather than on building monolithic applications. Even perl programmers often miss the point, writing the heart and soul of the application as perl script without making use of the UNIX toolkit. --David Korn
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5592 Jul 1 18:43 /bin/echo
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 6272 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/rev
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 7184 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/expand
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 7208 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/colrm
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 7440 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/fold
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 7456 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/head
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 7584 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/paste
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 7600 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/unexpand
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9680 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/uniq
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 10064 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/col
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 10272 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/column
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 11472 Jul 1 18:43 /bin/cat
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 12616 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/fmt
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 12696 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/cut
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 16176 Jul 1 18:43 /bin/expr
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 18664 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/tr
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 20640 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/tail
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 33560 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/sed
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 48400 Jul 1 18:44 /usr/bin/patch
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 53152 Jul 1 18:43 /bin/ed
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 65360 Jul 1 18:44 /usr/bin/sort
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 76720 Jul 1 18:44 /usr/bin/diff
-r-xr-xr-x 9 root wheel 86872 Jul 1 18:44 /usr/bin/grep
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 131808 Jul 1 18:44 /bin/sh
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 135472 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/awk
-r-xr-xr-x 6 root wheel 337112 Jul 1 18:45 /usr/bin/vi
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1475576 Jul 5 03:42 /usr/local/bin/vim
Notice how vim(1) is big - more than a million bytes! It's a monster and all you get that you don't have in the simple vi(1) is syntax highlighting and more bugs. FreeBSD is using nvi(1) which is an implementation of the original ex/vi text editor distributed as part of the Fourth Berkeley Software Distribution (4BSD), by the University of California, Berkeley.
Many of these tools use Regular Expressions (regex) to provide a concise and flexible means for identifying strings of text of interest. It is an ancient and sacred cipher that you must familiarize yourself with to work efficiently with line-oriented UNIX tools. more
Text based Internet
I strongly believe in the CLI text oriented Internet and communication in general. This graphics and flash based content so widespread after commercialization of the Internet is what creates many incompatible "standards" and formats.
You don't need an expensive top of the line computer to read and send email, or to access remote UNIX servers. In the beginning many users were connecting via terminals and serial lines to the same DEC minicomputer and were able to do all kinds of production work at the same time. Now you got your own PC that is much more powerful than those early minicomputers and still got problems with multitasking and accessing some portions of the bloated Web. This is ridiculous.
Preserving plain text communication and protocols used to transmit it (TELNET/SSH, SMTP, POP3/IMAP, FTP, NNTP) is very crucial to the existence of the Real Internet.
I believe that if this vision, or something like it, fails, the net as we know it will be replaced by something like cable TV. Lots of channels, filled with full color graphics, stereo sound, and impressive special effects, but (with very few exceptions) very little actual content. And all which you have to pay for. And all with ads, too, all the time. Ordinary people will have little ability to produce content for others to see. E-mail and newsgroups will be extinct, but there will be vast numbers of incompatible proprietary pay-per-post web-based conferencing systems. ANSI and RFC standards will be defunct, replaced by a flurry of incompatible and inefficient closed undocumented proprietary protocols with planned obsolesense. Last year's computer, or the wrong brand of computer, won't be able to view this year's web pages. Nor will users be allowed to program their own computers, as they might be attempting to break security, or to view web pages without seeing the ads, or without paying for it. --Keith Lynch
Linux -- Linux Is Not UniX
BSD is what you get when a bunch of UNIX hackers sit down to try to port a UNIX system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a UNIX system for the PC. --anonymous
There is a lot of hype nowadays concerning Linux. Major hardware and software vendors like HP, IBM, Dell, Oracle/Sun, SAP are supporting and endorsing it. They seem to forget that there exist the other free, open source server operating system which is a descendant of the Berkeley's BSD UNIX and in many cases much superior to Linux. This is FreeBSD. Still FreeBSD's code silently powers most heavily loaded Internet websites and network appliances. We find it in companies ranging from Yahoo! to Juniper, Nokia, Coyote Point and Isilon.
Technically speaking all systems which derive their code directly from the original AT&T UNIX from Bell Labs are UNIX systems; that include primarily BSD UNIX and System III/V and their derivatives. FreeBSD is the direct descendant of BSD UNIX developed at Berkeley and its code base is the prime example of that. On the other hand Linux started as an independent project with the aim to create a UNIX-like kernel. Linus Torvalds didn't have access to UNIX source code when he created the first version of Linux. GNU (GNU is Not Unix) which is a userland base for Linux is also not derived from UNIX source code, but is only imitating UNIX.
Epictetus
"I am sick here," said one of the pupils, "and I wish to return home." At home, I suppose, you free from sickness. Do you not consider whether you are doing, anything here which may be useful to the exercise of your will, that it may be corrected? For if you are doing nothing toward this end, it was to no purpose that you came. Go away. Look after your affairs at home. For if your ruling power cannot be maintained in a state conformable to nature, it is possible that your land can, that you will be able to increase your money, you will take care of your father in his old age, frequent the public place, hold magisterial office: being bad you will do badly anything else that you have to do. But if you understand yourself, and know that you are casting away certain bad opinions and adopting others in their place, and if you have changed your state of life from things which are not within your will to things which are within your will, and if you ever say, "Alas!" you are not saying what you say on account of your father, or your brother, but on account of yourself, do you still allege your sickness? Do you not know that both disease and death must surprise us while we are doing something? the husbandman while he is tilling the ground, the sailor while he is on his voyage? what would you be doing when death surprises you, for you must be surprised when you are doing something? If you can be doing anything better than this when you are surprised, do it. For I wish to be surprised by disease or death when I am looking after nothing else than my own will that may be free from perturbation, that I may be free from hindrance, free from compulsion, and in a state of liberty. I wish to be found practicing these things that I may be able to say to God, "Have I in any respect transgressed thy commands? have I in any respect wrongly used the powers which Thou gavest me? have I misused my perceptions or my preconceptions? have I ever blamed Thee? have I ever found fault with Thy administration? I have been sick, because it was Thy will, and so have others, but I was content to be sick. I have been poor because it was Thy will, but I was content also. I have not filled a magisterial office, because it was not Thy pleasure that I should: I have never desired it. Hast Thou ever seen me for this reason discontented? have I not always approached Thee with a cheerful countenance, ready to do Thy commands and to obey Thy signals? Is it now Thy will that I should depart from the assemblage of men? I depart. I give Thee all thanks that Thou hast allowed me to join in this Thy assemblage of men and to see Thy works, and to comprehend this Thy administration." May death surprise me while I am thinking of these things, while I am thus writing and reading. --Epictetus
Epictetus was a Greek philosopher who flourished in the early second century C.E.. He lived and worked, first as a student in Rome, and then as a teacher with his own school in Nicopolis in Greece. Our knowledge of his philosophy and his method as a teacher comes to us via two works composed by his student Arrian, the Discourses and the Handbook (Encheiridion). more
Read online all works of Epictetus preserved to our
times:
www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/epictetus/