Interestingly enough, the book consists of 25% bawwing that C is too hard, 50% historical anecdotes, 25% C rules that any serious C programmer already knows, 0% expert programming and 0% deep secrets.
The problem was caused by bad parsing of arguments, but it was facilitated by inadequate classification of arguments between switches and filenames. Many operating systems (e.g., VAX/VMS) distinguish between runtime options and other arguments (e.g., filenames) to programs, but UNIX does not; nor does ANSI C.
For those that don't have the book and want to save some trees and money.
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Anonymous2007-10-28 6:17
>>2,4
Enjoy your party van. What's the penalty for conspiracy to infringe on copyright?
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Anonymous2007-10-28 6:18
Some fun trivia: the tuna fish on the cover is a reference to the tunefs man pages, which has the curious note: "You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish."
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Anonymous2009-03-06 9:34
The world is really is way above your current skill level There is in the interaction between those things are relevant However?