Unix Printf Quotes

In my experience, telling someone to switch Unix shells for ease of use is like telling him to switch cigarette brands for his health. ~ Chris Espinosa

Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time. ~ Larry Wall

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again - making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. [ ... ] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics. ~ Neal Stephenson

Unix in particular is very poor at network printing. ~ Michael Sweet

Most hackers graduate from Unix and Linux platforms. They know them intimately. They don't try to exploit them ~ Dean Stockwell

A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring. ~ Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention. ~ Larry Wall

graphical user interfaces make
easy tasks easy, while command line interfaces make difficult tasks possible ~ William E. Shotts Jr.

Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement. ~ Hal Abelson

Many say that DOS is the dark side [from Star Wars], but actually UNIX is more like the dark side: It's less likely to find the one way to destroy your incredibly powerful machine, and more likely to make upper management choke. ~ Lore Sjoberg

An ugly system is one in which there are special interfaces for everything you want to do. Unix is the opposite. It gives you the building blocks that are sufficient for doing everything. That's what having a clean design is all about. ~ Linus Torvalds

Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy. ~ Rob Pike

found on other Unix-like systems. The design is actually specified in a published standard called the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. ~ William E. Shotts Jr.

From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it. ~ Dennis Ritchie

Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself - and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure. ~ Eric Allman

Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, they can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't. PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't. ~ Philip Greenspun

Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac and nobody cares about it. ~ Bill Joy

GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it. ~ Richard Stallman

Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems. ~ Brian Kernighan

The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected ... ~ Dennis Ritchie

Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor. ~ Dennis Ritchie

Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX. ~ Tom Christiansen

On a UNIX system, everything is a file; if something is not a file, it is a process. ~ Machtelt Garrels

When we take a top-tier view of the amount of code showing up inside of Linux today that is either directly related to our Unix System 5 that we directly own or is related to one of our flavors of Unix that we have derivative works rights over
we don't necessarily own those flavors, but we have control rights over how that information gets disseminated
the amount is substantial. We're not talking about just lines of code; we're talking about entire programs. We're talking about hundred [sic] of thousands of lines of code. ~ Darl McBride

In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe. ~ Eric S. Raymond

I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated. ~ Bill Joy

Unix is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate the simplicity.. ~ Dennis Ritchie

I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to Windows, and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot. ~ Jamie Zawinski

VI was predecessor to hundreds of word processing systems. By now, Unix folks see it as a bit stodgy - it hasn't the versatility of Gnu-Emacs, nor the friendliness of more modern editors. Despite that, VI shows up on every Unix system. ~ Clifford Stoll

If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot
of different places, just write a Unix operating system. ~ Linus Torvalds

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write. ~ Ken Thompson

That time in Seattle - during the lawsuit - was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX." "Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually exclusive. ~ Neal Stephenson

Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. ~ Douglas Gwyn

Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history. ~ Neal Stephenson

there are some problems no Unix command can address. ~ Aeleen Frisch

Huh? Windows was designed to keep the idiots away from Unix so we could hack in peace. Let's not break that. ~ Tom Christiansen