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gatech!seismo!mcvax!vu44!botter!ast
From: a...@botter.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc,net.wanted.sources,net.unix-wizards
Subject: Public domain UNIX utilities (e.g., tar, split) wanted/reward offered
Message-ID: <509@botter.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Feb-86 09:02:44 EST
Article-I.D.: botter.509
Posted: Tue Feb  4 09:02:44 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Feb-86 20:47:56 EST
Reply-To: a...@botter.UUCP (Andy Tanenbaum)
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 45


I have recently completed writing an operating system kernel from scratch that
is system call compatible with V7 UNIX. It is 11K lines of C and runs on the
IBM PC and 100% compatibles.    It requires 512K and 1 floppy (minimum).
A hard disk will be supported, but is not required.  When everything is done,
expected by Fall 1986, I will make the binaries and sources available on tape
and diskette for a nominal charge, sort of like the Kernighan and Plauger
Software Tools.  Everything will also be fully documented, eventually; at the
moment almost nothing is documented.

I also have a few of the common UNIX utilities written from scratch, including
   cat, chmod, chown, cp, date, echo, kill, ln, login, ls, mkdir, mkfs, mknod,
   mount, mv, od, passwd, pwd, rm, rmdir, size, sleep, su, sync, time, umount.
Not a line of AT&T code has been used, so there will be no licensing problems.

I am currently starting on the documentation, so I have no time to write any
more utilities (all of this has been done at home in my spare time). If anyone
has any other PUBLIC DOMAIN UNIX-type utilities in C that make only V7 system 
calls, I would be very interested in getting them.  It is essential that they
be in the public domain, so I can redistribute them without licenses. As a
reward I can offer the 1st person to supply a bug-free version of any program
I can use, a pre-pre release of my system.  Since I want to fit as much as
possible onto one 360K diskette, I am especially interested in programs
that are small, even if that means omitting a few obscure flags & features.  
The median disk space (i.e. ls -l size) for the above utilities is 2800 bytes.

The following are a few examples of things I would like: 
  ar, comm, dosread, doswrite, dd, file, pr, roff, sort, split, 
  tar, uniq; (dosread/write are programs to read/write DOS floppies)
Some of these are in Kernighan and Plauger, but I want them in C, not Pascal
or Ratfor, and I haven't the time to translate them.  I also need 
a simple shell.  (One of my students wrote a shell, but it
is only 8K is and very restricted.  I would like something closer to /bin/sh
but not taking up more than 15K on the disk; getting many programs on 
the diskette is much more important than having a million useless features.
I am working on a simple screen editor that is loosely based on the style
of Jove, but much smaller (estimated size 15K bytes).

If you are dying to get the pre-pre release and don't have any public domain
software, consider writing some yourself, but check with me first to avoid too
much duplication.  Small compilers/interpreters are also welcome.

If anyone having software meeting the above requirements could send it to me
at ...{philabs, seismo, decvax}!mcvax!vu44!ast, I would be very grateful.
    Andy Tanenbaum, Wiskunde, Vrije Univ., Postbox 7161, Amsterdam, Holland