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Comment by telemachos | Hacker News Reader

> A lot of legacy has been shed.

An example I remember from the UNIX to Plan 9 command translation page[1]:

    UNIX                       Plan 9

    head                       sed 10q

[1]: http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/unix_to_plan_9_com...

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Looking at this list I can't really tell why this is supposed to be better. Shedding complexity ok - but getting rid of many shorthands that are there for a reason? It reminds me of how Java wanted to replace printf with a ridiculously complex string formatting system.

The point is that "head" on your system is not the same as "sed 10q". There are two different codebases. By default head shows the first 10 lines but you can change it with flags etc. Well why bother when you already have sed to do that?

  head -n 5         sed 5q

For most cases, head is not a shortcut. 10 is just a special case.

I agree with that change. I don't with many others.

Getting rid of good things would be bad, but is sed 10q really "ridiculously complex"?

No, but $home instead of ~ is, IMO.

Ah, fair enough. I really only meant to cite the one example - since I found it so striking when I first saw it. (It had never occurred to me to use sed for head that way.)

The thing is that ~ is special shell magic. $home is an environment variable, and is consistently expanded as such.

Although, to my eyes, the most plan9-y way of implementing a home directory would be to have '/home' as your home directory no matter what, and have it default to a bind from /usr/$username.

btw why /usr? I get it that in unix legacy it started as the users folder, but won't this be confusing as hell for all people that have come to know it as unix system resources? Why not /users?

Because that is what it's called on plan9.

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