[fishtank]

Everybody who comes to know about systems calls will have learned the concept for the first time. Some people come to that knowledge by becoming a web developer, gaining some rudimentary understanding of the command line, typing `which cd`, and eventually reading the bash source. The fact that this is even possible is a testament to the author's curiosity and the value of free software.

Others come to that knowledge by reading a 650 page book about System V after graduating from university. Maybe they already learned it before getting the book, in some practical circumstance, like the author. Maybe they have always known it. But for me, an article by someone in the midst of their learning is a great help, an opportunity for others to share what they know, and exemplary of the hacker spirit.

[c22]

I think gp is not ragging on the blog's author for being a novice at Unix systems internals but lamenting the " I looked into this but then it all seemed so complicated so I stopped" attitude that is present in this as well as the sibling posts on sudo and ls. I would much prefer to read three posts delving deeper into the inner workings of any one of these commands than the existing three muddled surface level treatments.

[mturmon]

I had some of the same thoughts. But I learned C and Unix a long time ago, back when you could more easily understand the source code. I think we used a very early version of Minix, just a few thousand lines. It was a simpler time ;-).

Coming to it now, with all the layers that have built up -- the side-track for the script that uses tr, and the idiom with ${1+"$@"}, and all the cruft build up within sh(1) -- it must be pretty hard to separate what is incidental from what is fundamental.

[205guy]

Yes, thanks for putting it more succinctly than I could. I got the impression the author set out to understand 'cd' (which I would love to read about) then didn't, and I don't think we can tell from her article how much she got out of it. I quoted the part about higher-level languages because it's been my experience that a lot of those libraries are ultimately implemented in C somewhere down at the bottom as well.

I will say I did learn about some shell along the way and the bit about processes was interesting and starting to get at the core of 'cd'. It just seems like there are many other pieces of the puzzle, and I encourage the author to keep researching and keep writing about them.

[JdeBP]

I suggest a question and answer WWW site.

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/413225/5132

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/251215/5132

* https://superuser.com/a/380231/38062

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/34386/5132

... and so on.