Today, every Unix-like system can trace their ancestry back to the original Unix. That includes Linux, which uses the GNU tools – and the GNU tools are based on the Unix tools. Linux in 2024 is removed from the original Unix design, and for good reason – Linux supports architectures and tools not dreamt of during the original Unix era. But the core command line experience in Linux is still very similar to the Unix command line of the 1970s. The next time you use ls to list the files in a directory, remember that you’re using a command line that’s been with us for more than fifty years.
↫ Jim Hall
An excellent overview of some of the more ancient UNIX commands that are still with us today. One thing I always appreciate when I dive into an operating system closer to “real” UNIX, like OpenBSD, or a actual UNIX, like HP-UX, is just how much more logical sense they make under the hood than a Linux system does. This is not a dunk on modern Linux – it has to cater to endless more modern needs than something ancient and dead like HP-UX – but what I learn while using these systems closer to the UNIX has made me appreciate proper UNIX more than I used to in the past.
In what surely sounds like utter lunacy to system administrators who actually had to seriously administer HP-UX systems back in the day, I genuinely love using HP-UX, setting it up, configuring it, messing around with it, because it just makes so much more logical sense than the systems we use today. The knowledge gained from using BSD, HP-UX, and others, while not always directly applicable to Linux, does aid me in understanding certain Linux things better than I did before.
What I’m trying to say is – go and load up an old UNIX, or at least a modern BSD. Aside from being great operating systems in their own right, they’re much easier to grasp than a modern Linux system, and you’ll learn a lot form the experience.