[Coco] No easy rename on OS-9 ?

[Mike Hughes]

The programmers of Unix were rather bad typists, it would appear.  That's why we have so many abbreviated commands such as CP, LS, MV, CAT, etc., etc. etc.  They were also very big on devising multiple ways of doing the same thing.  Unfortunately, they were also big on making one "command" do multiple tricks by burdening the commands with multiple switches and modifiers such that every command needed a rather large "man" page to identify all that could be accomplished by deft used of such "modifiers".  As computers grew in their complexity, the "commands" grew in the number of switches tacked on to them.  Mastery of this repertoire is what gave the UNIX user the coveted title of GURU.  The first versions of Linux were somewhat limited in their memory capacity, so that they could NOT support these bloated commands with dozens of switches, so their "versions" were somewhat similar to the original versions of these UNIX commands.  How "fortunate" of you to have a version of UNIX that had enough memory to support all the hair involved with the extra burden of all those switches.  OS9 on the Coco was also limited, especially compared to the UNIX variants that were obtainable at the time, so their versions of these commands were somewhat limited as the early versions of Linux were.  Even so, it was possible to discover multiple ways of doing the same thing, thus adding another layer of similarity to UNIX.  The original idea behind CP vs. MV was preserved in the Coco version of OS9.  The version of OS9 that now exists, even for the Coco enhanced with 128K, 512K or 1M or more has the ability to rewrite some of these command to appear more like the "advanced" UNIXs that some are fondly familiar with.  It is a debatable as to whether this is a good thing or not.


-----Original Message-----
From: Johann Klasek <johann+coco at klasek.at>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Mon, Mar 31, 2014 3:15 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] No easy rename on OS-9 ?


On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 12:44:20PM -0400, billg999 at cs.uofs.edu wrote:
> >
> > I'm afraid that you are missing the historical lineage of OS9.  OS9 was
> > meant to be a "small computer" version of UNIX as was OS9's sister system,
> > some unknown operating system called "Linux".  In UNIX, MV was born as a
> > copy source to destination, then delete source so that is exactly the way
> > it is done in OS9!  (and Linux).  Contact the creators of UNIX to find out
> > why they did their programming in the way that they did.
> 
> I hate to burst your bubble, but that is just not true.  I just looked
> at the source for mv in Ultrix-11 V3.1 which is a DEC derivative of AT&T
> Version 7 Unix dating back to at least 1984 and what it does is:
> 1) determine if source is a directory then it can only rename, not move
> 2) attempts to link source and destination if this fails use "/bin/cp"
> 3) unlink source

Right, my old Coherent 3.2 (System 7) behaves like this, too.
Can be easily proven by looking at the i-node which is preserved in case
of a rename on the same filesystem.
Modern systems have file utilities which do this for directory
objects, too. Historically not supported on most old-style Unixes.


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