Projects

Plan 9 from User Space

Port of collection of Plan 9 utilities and protocol implementation to generic POSIX/X11R6 environment. Includes acme editor, factotum authentication agent, venti fs server and clients, rc shell, rio window manager and much more. All programs support UTF-8. Maintained by Russ Cox.

Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present. Plan 9 ... [More] demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to Unix users but at the same time quite foreign. In Plan 9, each process has its own mutable name space. A process may rearrange, add to, and remove from its own name space without affecting the name spaces of unrelated processes. Included in the name space mutations is the ability to mount a connection to a file server speaking 9P, a simple file protocol. [Less]

mksh

mksh is the MirBSD Korn Shell, largely similar to the original AT&T ksh, pdksh’s actively developed successor, portable. It includes bug fixes and improvements in order to produce a modern, robust shell good for interactive and especially script use. It has UTF-8 support and extended ... [More] compatibility to other modern shells. mksh compiles on: MirOS gcc3+pcc+SUNWcc, MidnightBSD gcc3+pcc; BSD/OS gcc1+2; DragonFly,Free/Net/OpenBSD gcc3+4; AIX gcc4+xlC9; DEC OSF/1 v2,ULTRIX 4.5 MIPS, Tru64 4/5.1 CompaqC+gcc2; HP-UX PA-RISC/IA64 gcc3+aCC; IRIX gcc3+MIPSpro; MacOSX,iPhone gcc3/4+llvm-gcc; QNX; Solaris 8/10 gcc3+SUNWcc; Interix gcc+msc; Cygwin gcc; UWIN-NT dmc+msc+Borland; GNU/Linux/kFreeBSD/HURD dietlibc+libc5+µClibc gcc2/3/4+icc+llvm-gcc+nwcc+tcc+TenDRA+llvm-clang; Haiku gcc; Minix3; Android; … [Less]

Inferno Distributed Operating System

Inferno® is a distributed operating system, originally developed at Bell Labs, but now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova® as Free Software. Applications written in Inferno's concurrent programming language, Limbo, are compiled to its portable virtual machine code (Dis), to run anywhere on ... [More] a network in the portable environment that Inferno provides. Unusually, that environment looks and acts like a complete operating system. The use of a high-level language and virtual machine is sensible but mundane. The interesting thing is the system's representation of services and resources. They are represented in a file-like name hiearchy. Programs access them using only the file operations open, read/write, and close. The 'files' may of course represent stored data, but may also be devices, network and protocol interfaces, dynamic data sources, and services. The approach unifies and provides basic naming, structuring, and access control mechanisms for all system resources. A single file-service protocol (called Styx or 9P2000) makes all those resources available for import or export throughout the network in a uniform way, independent of location. An application simply attaches the resources it needs to its own per-process name hierarchy ('name space'). The system can be used to build portable client and server applications. It makes it straightforward to build lean applications that share all manner of resources over a network, without the cruft of much of the 'Grid' software one sees. Inferno can run 'native' on various ARM, PowerPC, SPARC and x86 platforms but also 'hosted', under an existing operating system (including FreeBSD, Irix, Linux, MacOS X, Plan 9, and Solaris), again on various processor types. [Less]

Shell-Toolkit

Loose collection of fragments of shell scripts and programmes of random usefulness. May or may not work. Intended not so much for direct usage, but more as collection of examples. Aim for “good” code, to raise the overall quality of shell code on the world, which we believe has suffered from ... [More] too many bad tutorials written by beginners for absolute newbies… [Less]