What is UNIX? Re: wanted: UNIX or clone

[Peter da Silva]

In article <1991Mar27.192257.21635 at turnkey.tcc.com> jackv at turnkey.TCC.COM (Jack F. Vogel) writes:
> No big mystery, UNIX is a not some philosophical notion or abstraction.

UNIX is a family of operating systems with a common API. If you can compile
a UNIX program on it it's UNIX.

In fact, UNIX is:

	access alarm brk chdir chmod chown close creat dup exec
	exit fork getpid getuid getgid ioctl kill link lseek mknod
	mount open pause pipe read setuid setgid signal stat sync
	time umask umount unlink wait write

Any operating system that provides these 35 system calls with the semantics
described in Section 2 of the PRM is UNIX.

> Furthermore, the name "UNIX" is a registered
> trademark of AT&T. Philosophy and its abstractions...BAH!!

Marketing and its legalisms... BAH!

If it walks like a duck...
-- 
Peter da Silva.  `-_-'  peter at ferranti.com
+1 713 274 5180.  'U`  "Have you hugged your wolf today?"