Unix

Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally conceived and developed by a team of computer scientists while working at Bell Laboratories: Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. The design and implementation of Unix has come to influence the subsequent design of most operating systems that followed it, in one way or another. The desire for more portability in operating systems inspired by Unix also led to the co-development by Dennis Ritchie of the C programming language .

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Unix's influence in academic circles led to large-scale adoption (particularly of the BSD variant) of Unix by commercial startups, notably Sun Microsystems. Today, in addition to certified Unix systems, Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS X and BSD derivatives have matured.

What's in a Name?

The name and origin of Unix share a common source: MULTICS ((Multiplexed Information and Computing Service). "Unix" (originally 'Unics') itself is a play on words, basically standing for "Uniplexed Infomation and Computing Service." The point of this naming was chiefly to underscore that its design would be a rejection of the complexity of Multics, favoring a more practical and more easily developed model.

Common Unix Similarities

Among the diverse array of different variations of Unix, there are general similarities that one can expect to see consistently among the different versions. Listed here are several of the "common traits" of Unix in general.

The philosophy of Unix

Although there is quite a variety among Unix systems, one common theme is the so-called "small tools that do their job very well." That is, a Unix system has many programs, each of which specializes in a small task. The user can combine these tools (via scripting or piping) to accomplish higher level goals. Although this may make some tasks more difficult than common graphical user interfaces, it allows the user to perform complicated tasks that were not explicitly allowed for by the interface's designer.

For instance, suppose the user wanted to create an archive of all files which reference his vacation created between two and three month ago. Under Unix, this could be accomplished as a combination of tar (the archiving application), find (a file search application) and grep (a file pattern matching application). In a single command:

tar czf vacation.tar.gz `find . -ctime +60 -ctime -90 -exec grep -il vacation {} \;`

In contrast, a user in a typical graphical user interface would need to use the search application to find such files, wait for the search to complete, and then use an archiving application to create the archive.

File Structure

One of the more influential aspects of UNIX and UNIX-like systems is their hierarchical file structure. Files are organized into directories, each of which contains further directories and files in a branching structure, with the slash character "/" used to mark directory nodes. Each directory and file in UNIX also possesses a permissions string, with nine switches which can be set to allow (r)ead, (w)rite, and e(x)ecute permissions for (u)ser, (g)roup, and (others). A typical file might, for example, return the string

drwxr-xr-x 6 jsmith jsmith 204 Nov 4 11:12 directoryname

which indicates that the node is a dierctory, flagged for read, write and execute permission for its user, and read and execute only for its user's group, and others.

This combination of hierarchical structure and permissions settings enables by far the most effective, secure, and flexible operating system environment currently available. User groups can be set to allow different access levels across one branch, or the entire tree, with minimal difficulty. The superuser known as "root" in UNIX automatically has access to all files and directories.

Unix Today

Today Unix has a diverse and varied background, and various systems are split into branches of development, modified over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit organizations (some of them drawing enough influence and inspiration from Unix that they are referred to as being Unix-like).

Copyright Owner

The present owner of the trademark UNIX® is The Open Group, an industry standards consortium. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as "UNIX®" (others are called "Unix system-like" or "Unix-like"). Similarly, POSIX defines a standard set of system calls, utilities and standard library functions for Unix-like systems.

See also

• POSIX
• BSD
• Linux