who needs cat? (was: Re: How do you tell a wizard?)

[Maarten Litmaath]

kilroy at mimsy.umd.edu (Nancy's Fiance) writes:
\...
\Anyway, in article <1958 at cs-spool.calgary.UUCP> cliff at cpsc.ucalgary.ca
\	(Cliff Marcellus) writes:
\>In article <4282 at deimos.cis.ksu.edu>, brtmac at hobbes.ksu.ksu.edu
\>	(Brett McCoy) writes:
\>> 
\>>  Wizards do everything right the first time, hence the lack of need for
\>>  any editor.  They do all of their file creation with cat(1V).
\>
\>  Gee.  Did Dennis Ritchie simply do a :
\>
\>  % cat > vmunix.c
\
\Actually it was:
\
\% cat > vmunix.s

I can see you aren't wizards at all! :-)
You see, back in the old days ld(1) read from stdin if no files were
specified, so all Ritchie & Thompson had to do behind their frontpanels was:

	$ ld -o /unix
	<opcodes>
	^D
	$ reboot

Nowadays this behavior is mimicked somewhat by:

	% ln -s /dev/tty c.c
	% cc c.c
	main(){printf("Hello, UNIX\n");}
	^D
	% a.out

Under V7 the link was unnecessary, because cc(1) accepted input on stdin too.
Grrrrr, BSD!
-- 
A symbolic link is a POINTER to a file, | Maarten Litmaath @ VU Amsterdam:
 a hard link is the file system's GOTO. | maart at cs.vu.nl, mcsun!botter!maart