August 21, 2007

• On the Holy Trinity:

  Shell Game

  
  
  
  Part I:

  Overview of Unix
  
  at pangea.stanford.edu

  Last revision August 2, 2004

  “The Unix operating environment is organized into three layers. The innermost
  level of Unix is the kernel. This is the actual operating system, a single large
  program that always resides in memory. Sections of the code in this program are
  executed on behalf of users to do needed tasks, like access files or terminals.
  Strictly speaking, the kernel is Unix.

  The next level of the Unix environment is composed of programs, commands,
  and utilities. In Unix, the basic commands like copying or removing files are
  implemented not as part of the kernel, but as individual programs, no different
  really from any program you could write. What we think of as the commands and
  utilities of Unix are simply a set of programs that have become standardized and
  distributed. There are hundreds of these, plus many additional utilities in the
  public domain that can be installed.

  The final level of the Unix environment, which stands like an umbrella over
  the others, is the shell. The shell processes your terminal input and starts up
  the programs that you request. It also allows you to manipulate the environment
  in which those programs will execute in a way that is transparent to the program.
  The program can be written to handle standard cases, and then made to handle unusual
  cases simply by manipulating its environment, without having to have a special
  version of the program.” (My italics.)

  Part II:
  

  Programs

  From my paper journal
  on the date
  “Good Will Hunting”
  was released:

  Friday, December 5, 1997 To: The executive editor, The New York Times Re: The Front Page/His Girl Friday Match the speaker with the speech–
  The Speech– “The son of a bitch stole my…”			The Speaker	Frame of Reference
  1.	rosebud	A.	J. Paul Getty	The front page, N.Y. Times, Monday, 12/1/97
  2.	clock	B.	Joel Silver	Page 126, The New Yorker, 3/21/94
  3.	act	C.	Blanche DuBois	The Elysian Fields
  4.	waltz	D.	Bob Geldof	People Weekly 12/8/97
  5.	temple	E.	St. Michael	Heaven’s Gate
  6.	watch	F.	Susanna Moore	In the Cut (pbk., Dec. ’96) p. 261
  7.	line	G.	Joseph Lelyveld	Page A21, The New York Times, 12/1/97
  8.	chair	H.	Kylie Minogue	Page 69, People Weekly, 12/8/97
  9.	religion	I.	Carol Gilligan	The Garden of Good and Evil
  10.	wife	J.	John Travolta	“Michael,” the movie
  11.	harp	K.	Shylock	Page 40, N.Y. Review of Books, 12/4/97
  12.	Oscar	L.	Stephen King	The Shining (pbk., 1997), pp. 316, 317

  Postscript of June 5, 2003:

  “…while the scientist sees
  everything that happens
  in one point of
  space,
  the poet feels
  everything that happens
  in one point of time…
  all forming an
  instantaneous and transparent
  organism of events….”

  – Vladimir Nabokov

  Part III:
  
  The Bourne Shell
  
  

  “The binary program of the Bourne shell or a compatible program is located at /bin/sh on most Unix systems, and is still the default shell for the root superuser on many current Unix implementations.” –Wikipedia

  Afterword:

  See also
  the recent comments
  of root@matrix.net in
  Peter Woit’s weblog.

  
  “Hey, Carrie-Anne,

  what’s your game now….”
  – The Hollies, 1967   

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