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by trippy_biscuits 4314 days ago
"Unix: just enough potholes and bear traps to keep an entire valley going."

If you don't understand how to use sharp tools, you may hurt yourself and others. Documentation for fork() clearly explains why and when fork() returns -1. Those that find the man page lacking or elusive may get more out of an earnest study of W. Richard Stevens' book, Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment. In any case, every system programmer should own a copy and understand its contents.
2 comments
ben336 4314 days ago
> If you don't understand how to use sharp tools, you may hurt yourself and others.

It's still bad API design when naively handling an error case kills everything. Is there an inherent reason that the error value for a pid has to be the same as the "all pids" value? Unless there's a very compelling reason, it seems like very poor design, well documented or not.

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din-9 4314 days ago
The inherent reason is that -1 is the most common error return code in C based APIs. The problem is not naively handling an error case, it's not handling an error case. Using a different value might avoid calling killall -1, but the program would still be incorrect.

This is the same sort of argument as strlcat vs strncat, and people can't agree on that one.

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Oculus 4314 days ago
every system programmer should own a copy

I'd argue every programmer. It's such a fundamental part of computers & operating systems that key concepts will come up again and again. Just the other day I wanted to learn about Docker/CoreOS/etcd only to realize that I have an embarrassingly lacking understanding of how UNIX works. I immediately went to the library to pick up this book and begin fixing a flaw of mine (even as a web developer).

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TheEzEzz 4314 days ago
Meh. Not all programmers are on a UNIX system. Not all programmers are even on UNIX || Window.XX.

But even if there was only UNIX... the entire point of a well designed system is to allow users of the system to reason about it on a high level, not a domain-expert level or even domain-intermediate level. As programmers we reason about code without worrying too much about gate layout on silicon. As non-system programmers we should likewise not need to worry about shoddy OS design.

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