Living Homepage About Me Resume My PGP key Think Unix Publications Presentations Wedding Wishlist

Random Photos

Think Unix Errata

General Notes

Specific Errors

Page vi, Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Andy Johnston for talking with me about how to write an intro to Unix book, not an intro to a Unix book, as the acknowledgements state.
Page vi, Acknowledgements
The final two paragraphs were left out of the acknowledgements. They read as follows:

Thanks to all of my co-workers at UMBC, for tolerating week-long absences throughout this book, for general support, and for always pushing me to deepen my own Unix knowledge.

Finally, thanks to the Tuesday night crew at The Brewer's Art and the Thursday Night Bolton Hill Walkers' Patrol, for helping to keep me sane.

Page 17
The numeral six in the first paragraph should be superscripted, as it's a reference to the footnote at the bottom of the page.
Page 31
In the second example, there should be no blank line between 'Wang Bi' and 'Socrates'
Page 37
In the second paragraph, the tree command does not exist on Solaris and probably some other flavors of Unix.
Page 38
In the third paragraph from the bottom, 'This is little more useful' should read 'This is a little more useful.'
Page 39
In the first paragraph, 'mv arc/t*.txt' should be 'mv arc/t*.txt .' Failure to put that dot in the right place would overwrite whatever file was last in the list expanded from arc/t*.txt.
Page 41
Footnote 15 is referenced, but appears on page 42 instead.
Page 42
Footnote 15 appears, but was referenced on page 41 instead.
Page 43
In the second paragraph from the bottom, excluding the example, the first 'e' in 'execute' is italicized in error.
Page 44
In the setuid directory listing in the middle of the page, the '-rwsr-xr-x' should be joined with the following line of that listing.
Page 46
In the second paragraph from the bottom, the numerals representing user, group, and other permissions are read from left to right, rather than from right to left.
Page 49
In the third paragraph, I refer to 'my mydocs/unixbook/proposal' directory, when I should refer only to 'my docs/unixbook/proposal' directory.
Page 56
In the third paragraph from the bottom, I write that 'It's all right if a CPU takes up nearly 100%' of CPU time, when it should read that it's all right if a process takes up nearly 100% of CPU time.
Page 57
In the fourth paragraph, the r in compiler is not italicized along with the rest of the word; the whole word should be in italics.
Similarly, the trailing 'e' in 'machine code' in the fifth paragraph should be italicized too.
Page 67
In the third paragraph, it should be noted that using >& to merge STDERR and STDOUT does not work with the standard Bourne shell or the Korn shell. It does work in Bash, which is the shell used in most of this book.
Above the last paragraph, the line cat /etc/passwd| grep ^ username:|cut -d : -f 7 should have the space between the carat (^) and the word username removed.
Page 74
A series of typos in the second sentence of first paragraph of the new section renders it rather unintelligible. This sentence should read: 
The language metaphor for Unix is particularly apt here: Single pipes
are like simple sentences, whereas longer pipelines are like complex
sentences.
Above the last paragraph, the line cat /etc/passwd| grep ^ username:|cut -d : -f 7 should have the space between the carat (^) and the word username removed. Also, the word username should be italicized, as it refers to the reader's username and should not be read literally.
Page 89
In the second paragraph, I write that IPv6 has a 64-bit address space. In fact, it has a 128-bit address space.
Page 92
The second sentence on the page should begin 'More important,' rather than 'More importantly.'
Page 95
In the header for the new section, the digit three in 'POP3' should not be subscripted.
Page 115
In the last paragraph of the page, all single quotes should be back quotes: d'a should be d`a, y'c should be y`c, and c'x should be c`x.
Page 123
Several different carat (^) characters are used on this page. They should all be identical. (Which one? It doesn't matter, really. Ideally they should look like what shows up on your screen when you hit shift-6 using a US-English keyboard.)
The last word in the fourth paragraph from the bottom is 'regexps,' not 'regsxp.'
The last sentence in the third paragraph from the bottom is incorrect. It should read: 
As a regular expression, it wouldn't match ta, tap,
tapper, or anything with any character other than t
anywhere in the expression.
Page 124
In the last paragraph, regular expressions are not bolded consistently. Imagine all regular expressions on this page being bolded consistently. It would sure look nicer, wouldn't it? It might be easier to read, too.
Page 128
In the last paragraph above the practice problems, the word 'buffer' has been appended to the end of the last sentence for no good reason whatsoever.
In practice problem 16, you should replace any three consecutive digits with a single instance of the word know.
Page 145
In practice problems 6 through 9, rev and tac are not available on all flavors of Unix. They are available on most BSD systems and most systems that use the GNU tools, in my experience. They are not included in the /usr/ucb tools on Solaris systems.
Page 154
In the second paragraph, there's a stray æ character at the end of SIGWINCH. It doesn't belong there.
Page 162
In the first paragraph following the example, '/bin/ksh' should be on a single line, rather than its current state, wherein the first forward slash is on the line above the rest of the file name.
Page 164
The last line of the first example should read: 
ls: `echo bin`: No such file or directory
That is, the quotes surrounding "echo bin" should be back quotes, not forward quotes. This is correct in the paragraph that follows the example.
In the last paragraph, there's an extraneous space in the prompt, which should read [jon@frogbog tmp]$ .
Page 171
The section header should read &&, ||, and !, not &&, ??, and !
Page 173
In the first line, 'list commands to be done' should read 'list of commands to be done.'
Page 180
The third line of the example should read 
> mv $foo `echo $foo|sed 's/-/_/g'`
That is, backticks should surround the echo statement. This error is repeated in the first sentence following the example.
Page 182
The third line from the bottom of the page should read as follows: 
> DIRCOUNT=`expr $DIRCOUNT + 1`
That is, the quotes should be backquotes again.
Page 186
In the command at the bottom of page 186, there should be a semicolon before the close-curly-brace.
Page 187
In the second paragraph, the grouping commands each have an extra closing character at the end; that is, they should read ( cd /etc ; grep my-regexp * ; cd * ) 2> /dev/null and { cd /etc ; grep my-regexp * ; cd * } 2> /dev/null.
In the third paragraph, the find statement should be surrounded by back quotes rather than by single quotes.
Page 192
The comments leading off the bin/add script refer to it as addcol rather than add. This is just more proof that you can't trust the documentation.
Page 195
In the second paragraph from the bottom, 'echo 10' should read 'echo $10.'
Page 234
The second paragraph is not entirely clear as to why the menus would be sized poorly: it is because the SimpleMenu widget upon which xterm menus are based is dimensioned in pixels rather than characters, as the xterms themselves are dimensioned.
In the second example on the page, the single quotes should be back quotes.
Page 246
The answer to Chapter 1 Problem 5 is incorrect. The correct answer is 
telephone [-h|-s] [[1[-]]NNN[-]]NNN[-]NNNN
Page 247
In chapter 2, problem 21, I state that "Permissions on one [hard link] do not affect permissions on the other." This is backwards: they do affect permissions on the other.
Page 248
In the solution to chapter 5, problem 4, the correct mapping should be 
 :map! <F7> ^[:q!
Mike Cappella's errata claims that this is still wrong, as the F7 key has already been mapped, but it has not been mapped in insert mode.
In the solution to chapter 5, problem 8, the question mark should be a period.
The solution to problem 9 for chapter 5 is, as Mike Cappella provides, 
 grep \<n[a-zA-Z]t\>

In chapter 5, problem 12, the i flag for sed is not available on Solaris and some other Unix flavors. There is no entirely correct solution using only sed of which I am currently aware.
In chapter 5, problem 14, the answer should be 
sed 's/No/Yes/2'
- thanks again go to Mike Cappella for this corrected answer.
Page 264
The SysV glossary entry is poorly worded. Truly horribly worded. The last part of the second sentence should read 'System V, Release 4 (SVR4) is the standard which most commercial Unix flavors claim to resemble.'

Outdated URLs

I know of no outdated URLs at this time.

Details, Details, Details...

If you find any errors in the book not listed on this page, please mail me at jon@lasser.org and let me know.

My home page is here.

Jon Lasser <jon@lasser.org>
130 Harvard Ave E. #615, Seattle, WA 98102
AIM: jonathanlasser
Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS! [Valid RSS]
Last Modified: Tuesday, 01-Feb-2005 16:40:22 EST