Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!unido!mikros!mwtech!martin
From: martin@mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc
Subject: Re: Complete Man Pages (was Re: UNIX Documentation)
Keywords: unix, documentation, manual, research, index
Message-ID: <1048@mwtech.UUCP>
Date: 15 Jan 91 10:31:29 GMT
References: <276d312d-8aecomp.unix.i386@point.UUCP> <33791527@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <1990Dec28.004756.6019@eci386.uucp> <1990Dec29.045924.656@met
Reply-To: martin@mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel)
Organization: MIKROS Systemware, Darmstadt/W-Germany
Lines: 44

In article <1991Jan12.120532.455@am.sublink.org> alex@am.sublink.org (Alex Martelli) writes:
>jjones@cs.uiuc.edu (Joel Jones) writes:
>	...
>:at one time or another.  Wouldn't it be nice if there was _one_ set of manuals
>:that could be used for all major variants?  What I have in mind would be man
>:pages that would have marked with sidebars the areas in which the semantics
>
>I WOULD give an eye and a tooth for this, and I'm NOT joking.  Such
>a manual would easily be worth upwards of a thousand dollars to us,
>just for parts 2 and 3; even more if complete.  We must support more
>than 10 different platforms...!

Well, maybe not exactly what you are looking for, because it is a little
out-of-date these days, but some years ago the following book was quite
valuable to me:
		Portable C and UNIX System Programming
		J.E. Lappin
		Rabbit Software
		Prentice Hall
		ISBN 0-13-686494-5

At the time when this book appeared (1987), UNIX was still more
diverging than today (SysV R4 which seems to unify UNIX/XENIX/BSD
was not even thought about). There were several guides which tried
to compare different commands and options of all the flavours of *IX,
but non was really satisfactory, as it isn't sufficient to know that
there ARE different options, when you need more detailed explanations.

The above mentioned book did an `in-depth'-comparision of the major
*IX variants that were available at this time. I found it valuable
to see what dark corners should be avoided to ease the process of
porting software.

I'd much appreciate to hear that there's something like an update or
a second edition of this book, including more recent variants. (The most
recent in this book are SysV R2, Microsoft XENIX 5.0 and BSD 4.3.)

Finally an interesting remark about the "author" of this book (taken
from the back-cover text): "J.E. Lapin does not exist as an individual.
The name represents the many individuals at Rabbit [Software Corporation]
who were involved in the research and creation of the information
contained herein."
-- 
Martin Weitzel, email: martin@mwtech.UUCP, voice: 49-(0)6151-6 56 83