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Comment by Joker_vD

3 days ago

> When you read about the supposed evils of cat -v from the Unix nostalgia people, remember that it was the same people who gave cat its -v option who also gave cp its -r option, in 4.2BSD.

Then the people who complained about cat -v went ahead and made better Unix, called Plan 9, in which moving (as opposed to merely renaming) a directory is impossible: instead, you're supposed to do mkdir && dircp && rm -r. Which is quite a choice, if I say so myself: there is simply no low-level primitive (syscall or 9p message) for moving files across directories, even on the same file server. Their version of mv can move files across the directories, but it's still done with internal equivalent of cp+rm.

They also ignored what was happening with C outside Bell Labs, and thus the Plan 9 C compiler is rather special versus a ISO C compiler of the time, in how files are organised and available features.

Afterwards they made a better Plan 9, called Inferno, with a safer userspace programming language, leaving their C creation only for kernel code, and DisVM implementation.