A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later.<p>POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It&#x27;s been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes.<p><pre><code>    Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a&#x27; means &quot;check first&quot; and upper-case `A&#x27; means &quot;delete all my disk files without asking&quot; (or something like that --- I may not have the details exactly right). In some versions of tar these meanings are reversed. This is a virtue?
</code></pre>
Raise your hand if you&#x27;ve never broken Grep because the flags you gave it didn&#x27;t work. Anyone? Congratulations, you&#x27;ve worked on a single version of grep your entire life. Have a cookie.<p>Pretty much the only consistent grep flag I know is -i. There&#x27;s never been a standard for naming and abbreviating flags, which means that for EACH program you will have to learn new flags.<p>This becomes truly terrible when you get around to, say, git and iptables. Have you ever tried to read git documentation? It is the most useless godawful piece of nonsense this side of the Moon.<p>There&#x27;s Google now, which means that the fundamental design issues of POSIX will probably never get issued. &quot;Just google it and paste in from stackoverflow&quot; is already standard, and people are already doing that for 5-10-year-old code&#x2F;shell commands. What about 10 years from now, will googling best DHCP practices still find that stupid post from 2008 that never got actually resolved? How about 20 years?<p>I have honestly no idea how to even start fixing the problem. A proper documentation system would be a start.