The UNIX Programming Environment

Cover of The Unix Programming Environment, 1984

The Unix Programming Environment is a textbook written by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, both of Bell Labs. It is considered an important and early book on the Unix operating system. Often considered "the Bible", it is considered the most authoritative work on Unix. It was first published in 1984 by Prentice Hall.

The book starts off with an introduction to Unix for beginners. Next, it goes into the basics of the file system and shell. The reader is led through topics ranging from the use of filters, to how to use C for programming robust Unix applications, and the basics of grep, sed, make, and awk. The book closes with a tutorial on making a programming language parser with yacc and how to use troff with ms and mm to format documents, the preprocessors tbl, eqn, and pic, and making man pages with the man macro set. The appendices cover the ed editor and the abovementioned programming language, named hoc, which stands for "high-order calculator")

The book is perhaps most valuable for its exposition of the Unix philosophy of small cooperating tools with standardized inputs and outputs, a philosophy that also shaped the end-to-end philosophy of the Internet. It is this philosophy, and the architecture based on it, that has allowed open source projects to be assembled into larger systems such as Linux, without explicit coordination between developers.

The only issue is that the book was written before ANSI C was first drafted, therefore the programs in the book are nonstandard and follow K&R style. However, the source code to hoc available on the book's website has been updated for ANSI C conformance (but uses the implicit int rule, which is disallowed in C99).

ISBN 0-13-937681-X (paperback), 0-13-937699-2 (hardback).

External links

• Homepage at Bell Labs
• An On-line book sharing the same name, retrieved 10 January 2008.

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