Chapter 13 and 14: The File System & NFS

The chapter begins with an explanation of what a filesystem is and what kind of filesystems there are on Unix.

Quote:Its most salient feature was its freewheeling conventions for filenames: it imposed no restrictions on the characters in a filename other than disallowing the slash character and the ASCII NUL. As a result, filenames could contain a multitude of unprintable (and untypable) characters, a “feature” often exploited for its applications to “security”.

I hate the lack of restrictions on the filename. ls(1) output cannot be parsed safely.

Quote:FFS introduced a variety of new and incompatible features. Foremost among these was symbolic links -- entries in the file system that could point to other files, directories, devices, or whatnot.

I agree with cat-v: symlinks were a bad idea.

Quote:In any event, fsch can take 5, 15, or 20 minutes to find out. During this time, Unix is literally holding your computer hostage.

I remember once I had a power failure and then 10 minutes of fsck.

The chapter then goes on things that the Unix filesystem lacked:

• Journaling.
  
• Records and record-based file locking.
  
• Additional metadata associated with a file (like filetype and access control list).
  

Creators Admit C, Unix Were Hoax

Quote:In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working exclusively in Lisp on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years

lol

The Rise of Worse Is Better

This is a classic by Richard P. Gabriel. It talks abut the “New Jersey Style”, that writing functionally simple programs is preferable.