Archaeology in Sobell’s “Unix System V – A Practical Guide”

Clearing some boxes recently, and pulled up an old gem that I used to carry around university. Mark Sobell’s Unix System V – A Practical Guide A lot of it is still relevant today for linux and even OSX users, with basic guides to shells, redirections, awk, sed and vi. Some of it is however (predictably) dated. Chapter 7 has some lovely spots to dig for buried treasure.

finger

Does my current machine even have finger? hehe, wow, it does.

karlp@teros:~$ finger
Login     Name           Tty      Idle  Login Time   Office     Office Phone   Host
karlp     Karl Palsson  *:0             Sep  7 10:09                           (:0)
karlp     Karl Palsson   pts/0      23  Sep  7 10:09                           (:0)
karlp     Karl Palsson   pts/1      29  Sep  7 11:35                           (:0)
karlp     Karl Palsson   pts/2          Sep  7 11:35                           (:0)
karlp@teros:~$

Ok, cool, let’s try the example from the book!

karlp@teros:~$ finger quake@gldfs.cr.usgs.gov
finger: unknown host: gldfs.cr.usgs.gov
karlp@teros:~$ 

Oh well, somewhat predictable. No live earthquake list for me.

telnet services

We’ll skip over all the descriptions of FDDI, XNS, rlogin and hosts files, proceed straight to the library of congress information system.

karlp@teros:~$ telnet locis.loc.gov
telnet: locis.loc.gov: Name or service not known
locis.loc.gov: Unknown host
karlp@teros:~$

Or not.

archie and gopher

wow, archie, I’d forgotten about archie and gopher. can’t even try these, no archie in current fedora, and no package for it either :)

Oh well. it was fun to skim over the chapter again :)

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