History Question

[Ben Pfaff]

Edward Glowacki <glowack2@msu.edu> writes:

> On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, Tim Schmidt wrote:
> > Yes, This is what I've read countless times...  that Linux was built from 
> > the ground up (of course, starting from the home-brew kernel of Linus) and 
> > at most borrowed some misc code from Minix for a couple of months while 
> > Linus hacked out his own.  That's why I was wondering where this supposed 
> > "core of Linux came from BSD" stance came from...

> Hmm, maybe the author pulled it out of his %@@?

If you figure that the author should have said "GNU/Linux"
instead of "Linux", it kinda makes sense.  GNU uses some BSD
utilities in userland, or at least derivatives of them, or at
least the ideas and command-line syntax behind them.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Some days things work out in the end, despite all the problems
you have.  Today I was faced with sending an email from Pilot,
actually using Elm through a telnet interface, because I couldn't
directly extract the email aliases file from the MSU fencing team
mail account; there are so many aliases there that it would be a
nightmare to translate them by hand.

*sigh*  I tried to think of an alternative; Pilot's
ELM-through-telnet interface is an unmitigated POS to my mind,
and I'll do almost anything to avoid it.  Here's what I
eventually came up with:

	* Found and FTP'd the .elm/aliases.text file from the
          fencing account.  Hmm: format is weird.

	* Installed ELM locally for more info (`apt-get install
          elm-me+').  Hey--it has a description of the aliases
          file format, and a utility (elmalias) to dump it out in
          a semi-reasonable format.

	* Wrote Perl script to translate output of elmalias into
          list of actual email addresses.

	* Wrote Emacs Lisp code to pick off the last word I'd
          typed and pass it to the Perl script, then insert the
          results into my Emacs buffer and format it nicely, then
          append the signature I use when wearing my
          fencing-captain hat to the message buffer.

It's amazing, sometimes, what you can salvage from a situation
that seems like a total fsckup.  (At least, if you know a little
Perl and Lisp.)