A Unix Quiz (2012)

atannen · on Jan 22, 2020

I can get a bunch right, especially question 48 - that's me. (hi rob) :) Still hacking after all these years.

schoen · on Jan 22, 2020

Wow, I think of myself as very knowledgeable about Unix and its history, and I arguably got six of these right. It's a pretty tough quiz if you didn't work at Bell Labs and if you learned Unix after the 1980s.

jhbadger · on Jan 22, 2020

Some of them have been immortalized past their time by the fortune (6) command, though. While I never used the source control system being referred to in question 1, I remember Ken Thompson's comparison of it to a "roach motel" trap from a fortune saying.

jlgaddis · on Jan 23, 2020

The answers: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/01/unix-quiz-answers...

jasoneckert · on Jan 23, 2020

I'm somewhat disappointed that the list of questions was displayed on the site, and not as a downloadable file.

Because everything in UNIX is a file ;-)

I'll let myself out now...

jlgaddis · on Jan 23, 2020

The questions were provided in a downloadable file:

  unix-quiz.html

Extracting them from there using only (one of) "grep" or "sed" was left as an exercise for you. I'm somewhat disappointed in your lack of success.

fsniper · on Jan 22, 2020

Is the source code motel compiler? Or is it /dev/null? Or something else? These questions are tough.

floren · on Jan 22, 2020

It's SCCS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System)

fanf2 · on Jan 23, 2020

I have used SCCS in two ways:

(1) first encounter was browsing Kirk McKusick’s CSRG archives of BSD source code, by which I learned the very basics

(2) close encounter was to uplift a project with nearly 25 years of history from SCCS to git: https://www.dns.cam.ac.uk/news/2014-11-27-sccs-to-git.html

ridiculous_fish · on Jan 23, 2020

SCCS still echoes even in clang: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34142682/what-is-the-bac...

noobdood · on Jan 22, 2020

My tries:

>22. Who was rabbit!bimmler

User Bimmler on the rabbit machine, maybe Elizabeth (IIRC, from K&R or K&P book).

>44. What language preceded C?

B.

>45. What language preceded B?

BCPL.

>64. How many different meanings does Unix assign to '.'?

1) Current directory

2) Prefix character for "hidden" file names.

>75. What does grep stand for?

Globally find Regular Expression and Print.

teddyh · on Jan 22, 2020