At this moment, I am patiently working my way through some open-source code to find a bug (“Cruise Control” if you want to know).
I have again encountered that often-used alias for Unix in some of the source code comments: “*nix”
I have seen “Un*x” as well in many places.
I feel that I am missing some obvious inside joke here.
Once upon a time, I thought it might be some kind of copyright issue, but I find that people often use “Un*x” and “Unix” randomly in the same document.
I also considered that it might be a slam that a non-Unix user might use, in the same way that non-Windows users sometimes refer to the platform as “Windoze.” I dismissed this because I often see very pro-Unix folks using these variants.
Mainly because there are a host of mostly-similar Unix clones in the world and if you write portable code, your programs will probably be able to run on all of them.
They even seem to have similar names: Unix, Linux, Minix, HP-UX, Xenix, etc.
The asterisk is the Kleene star, and it matches zero or more contiguous characters. Notionally, it’s used to refer to *nixes as a general class of machines without singling out any example of that class.
And Unix (or UNIX?) is a registered trademark of AT&T, via its former Bell Labs department (since divested and turned into Lucent Technologies). But I don’t think *nix is in any way related to that.
As Darleth points out, nix or Unx are idioms used to refer to any Unix-like operating system, such as Linux, the BSDs, the UXes, Solaris, and so-forth. Also “Unix” is a trademark now owned by The Open Group. Use of those idioms is to differentiate between Unix the specific trademarked product name, and Unix-like, which refers to dozens (hundreds?) of seperate OSes.
freido: Ah! I forgot about The Open Group. Yeah, they determine POSIX compliance and thereby determine who can call themselves a Unix. (Or am I completely confused?)
I got confused by the fact that Bell Labs’ big OS after Unix, Plan 9, was handed over to Lucent. Oh, well.
POSIX is a set of IEEE Standards (1003.1, etc.) , which at least at the beginning defined the common subset of API’s among *NIX implementations.
The Open Group is responsible for the Single Unix Specification, which is a much closer to a superset, with conflicts being resolved slanting towards the SysV rather than the BSD branches of UNIX ancestry. As new POSIX standards have been adopted (realtime, threads, etc.), they’ve been pulled into the SUS.
Well, “officially”, most Linux distros aren’t Unix - a few of them have gotten SUS certified, but the vast majority don’t bother. Of course, this means that most Linux distros are “merely” 99% functionally identical to Unix. Of course, it’s a bit of a pain to keep saying “Unix-like” or “POSIX compliant” to mean that it works the same way as Unix, when the word Unix, itself, conveys this.
Incidentally, in discussions of Linux internals, you’ll often see people ritually including the text “Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.” This is a bit of an inside joke, since its a modification of the old AT&T ritualism.
Oh, I know that. I was just pointing out why people tend to include such a notice in their discussions of the kernel - namely, because of all those old genuflections toward AT&T.
By the way, the current owners of the Unix intellectual property appear to be the SCO group… they’re engaged in an IP legal battle to try to wring every last $ out of this property, too…
Programmers started that way back when, as a wry comment on AT&T’s trademark. When I worked for DEC back in the early ULTRIX days, we had all sorts of fun trying to qualify to use the term UNIX.
