More Old Code at GitHub

Thursday December 10, 2009

•  bsd •  computer science •  information technology •  M-Net •  software •  software engineering •  systems science •  Unix •  utilities •  uwatch •  write • 

I have recovered from an old Iomega Zip disk a few more programs I wrote in the 1997-1998 time frame which may be of some interest:

daemon

Daemon was originally written for FreeBSD to use the 4.4BSD library function, daemon(3) to launch a command after disassociating itself from the controlling TTY.  I originally saw such an application on M-Net which ran BSD/OS 3.1 at the time.  The source was unavailable, but it was easy to reimplement.  Modern Linux implementations now include daemon(3), so it should be usable on Linux today.

rpt

Rpt was based upon the source from daemon, above but instead of disassociating from the controlling terminal, rpt reruns the command at a specified interval.  This allows the user to monitor the output of a program over time.

uwatch

Uwatch was also born of M-Net.  M-Net is an interactive BBS system dating back to 1983, which has always allowed users to communicate directly in real time.  As a result, someone once developed a program to notify users when their friends logged in or out.  However, it was always spotty at best, especially during a long session.  I worked extensively on it back in 1997 to solve some memory management issues.  This is what remains of that effort.

write

When I was a student at Miami University, we had several Linux systems spread across three (of four) campuses and we occasionally used write(1) to talk to each other.  This implementation of write honors MIT’s Project Athena’s network-aware write protocol and allows users to send message to users on other systems.