Unix编程艺术（前言）

Preface

前言

Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.

--NealStephenson

Unix与其说是一个操作系统，不如说是一部口述史。

―― 作者：NealStephenson

There is a vast difference between knowledge and expertise. Knowledge lets you deduce the right thing to do; expertise makes the right thing a reflex, hardly requiring conscious thought at all.

知识和专业技术有很大的不同。知识引导你去做正确的事；专业技术使你做正确的事成为条件反射，几乎不需要下意识的思考。

This book has a lot of knowledge in it, but it is mainly about expertise. It is going to try to teach you the things about Unix development that Unix experts know, but aren’t aware that they know. It is therefore less about technicalia and more about shared culture than most Unix books — both explicit and implicit culture, both conscious and unconscious traditions. It is not a ‘how-to’ book,it is a ‘why-to’ book.

本书涉及到很多知识，但主要是专业技术。它教你Unix开发的技术，这些技术是专家知道、但并没有意识到的。所以本书涉及到的技巧比较少，与大多数Unix书籍相比，本书更多的是共享文化――既包括外在和内在文化，也包括惯例和潜规则。它不是一本“怎样去做”的书，而是一本“为什么做”的书。

The why-to has great practical importance, because far too much software is poorly designed. Much of it suffers from bloat, is exceedingly hard to maintain, and is too difficult to port to new platforms or extend in ways the original programmers didn’t anticipate. These problems are symptoms of bad design. We hope that readers of this book will learn something of what Unix has to teach about good design.

“为什么做”有很大的实用价值，因为到目前为止，相当多的软件设计得很糟糕。它们大多设计得臃肿，难以维护，很难移植到新的平台，或者在进行功能扩展时其难度超出了最初的程序员的期望。我们希望本书的读者学会一些Unix设计的好的东西。

This book is divided into four parts: Context, Design, Tools, and Community. The first part (Context) is philosophy and history, to help provide foundation and motivation for what follows. The second part (Design) unfolds the principles of the Unix philosophy into more specific advice about design and implementation. The third part (Tools) focuses on the software Unix provides for helping you solve problems. The fourth part (Community) is about the human-to-human transactions and agreements that make the Unix culture so effective at what it does.

本书分成四部分：来龙去脉，设计，工具 和 社群。第一部分（来龙去脉）讲述思想和历史，为后面的章节打基础。第二部分（设计）对原理和Unix思想进行了展开，讲述更详细的设计和实现的建议。第三部分（工具）聚焦在Unix提供的能够帮你解决问题的工具上。第四部分（社群）是关于人与人之间的交流和协议，这些使Unix文化更加有生气。

Because this is a book about shared culture, I never planned to write it alone. You will notice that the text includes guest appearances by prominent Unix developers, the shapers of the Unix tradition. The book went through an extended public review process during which I invited these luminaries to comment on and argue with the text. Rather than submerging the results of that review process in the final version, these guests were encouraged to speak with their own voices, amplifying and developing and even disagreeing with the main line of the text.

由于本书是一本关于共享文化的书，我并不打算独自一人写它。你会发现它包括许多Unix开发者和Unix传统缔造者的观点。在我邀请大量的学者评论、讨论原文的期间，本书经过了一个长期的公共评审的过程。在本书最终版本并没有抛弃评审过程中的结果，来宾们畅所欲言，增强了、发展了原文的主线，当然也使原文的主线产生了一定的分歧。

In this book, when I use the editorial ‘we’ it is not to pretend omniscience but to reflect the fact that it attempts to articulate the expertise of an entire community.

在本书中，当我用“我们”这个语调的时候，并不是装作什么都知道，只是想反映一个事实：尝试着清晰的阐述这个社群的一致意见。

Because this book is aimed at transmitting culture, it includes much more in the way of history and folklore and asides than is normal for a technical book. Enjoy; these things, too, are part of your education as a Unix programmer. No single one of the historical details is vital, but the gestalt of them all is important. We think it makes a more interesting story this way. More importantly, understanding where Unix came from and how it got the way it is will help you develop an intuitive feel for the Unix style.

因为本书的目的是传输知识，除了是一本技术上的书，它还包含了一些历史和传说。这也是Unix程序员教育的一部分，充分享受它们吧。并不是其中每个历史资料是至关重要的，它们的有机整合却很重要。我认为，以这种方式可以创建一个更有趣的故事。更重要的，了解Unix的来龙去脉会发展你对Unix风格的直觉。

For the same reason, we refuse to write as if history is over. You will find an unusually large number of references to the time of writing in this book. We do not wish to pretend that current practice reflects some sort of timeless and perfectly logical outcome of preordained destiny. References to time of writing are meant as an alert to the reader two or three or five years hence that the associated statements of fact may have become dated and should be double-checked.

相同的理由，我拒绝写历史将结束。在本书中你可以找到异乎寻常多的关于这方面的参考资料。我并不想伪称当前的实践多多少少能够影响永恒和合理的命运。作品的参考期限意在提醒读者，两年、三年或五年，因此相关事实的陈述可能变得过期，或双倍的被肯定。

Other things this book is not is neither a C tutorial, nor a guide to the Unix commands and API. It is not a reference for sed or Yacc or Perl or Python. It’s not a network programming primer, nor an exhaustive guide to the mysteries of X. It’s not a tour of Unix’s internals and architecture, either.Other books cover these specifics better, and this book points you at them as appropriate.

另外，本书并不是一本C指南，也不是一本Unix命令和API的指南。它不是一本Sed ,Yacc，Perl或Python的参考，它不是网络初级编程，也不是一本神秘的X指南，它也不是一本对Unix体系结构入门的书。其他的书在这些细节上写得更好，这本书仅点到为止。

Beyond all these technical specifics, the Unix culture has an unwritten engineering tradition that has developed over literally millions of man-years of skilled effort. This book is written in the belief that understanding that tradition, and adding its design patterns to your toolkit, will help you become a better programmer and designer.

超越这些技术细节，Unix文化有个不成文的工程惯例，在这个惯例的基础上已经发展了几百万人年的成就。这本书正式秉着这个惯例的理念写的。 并且把它的设计模式加进了你的工具包，这将帮助你成为更好的程序员和设计师。

Cultures consist of people, and the traditional way to learn Unix culture is from other people and through the folklore, by osmosis. This book is not a substitute for person-to-person acculturation, but it can help accelerate the process by allowing you to tap the experience of others.

文化由人组成，学Unix文化的传统方式是从其他人身上学到或者靠传说的渗透。这本书并不是一本人与人之间的文化适应的替代品，而是允许你通过学习别人的经验上来加速你学习的过程。

Who Should Read This Book

谁应该读这本书

You should read this book if you are an experienced Unix programmer who is often in the position of either educating novice programmers or debating partisans of other operating systems, and you find it hard to articulate the benefits of the Unix approach.

如果你是一个培养新手的Unix程序员，在争辩与其它的操作系统的优劣时，并且很难讲清Unix的好处，那么你就应该读这本书。

You should read this book if you are a C, C++, or Java programmer with experience on other

operating systems and you are about to start a Unix-based project.

如果你是一个C、C++或Java程序员，你有其他操作系统的经验并且准备转向基于Unix的程序设计，那么你应该读这本书。

You should read this book if you are a Unix user with novice-level up to middle-level skills in

the operating system, but little development experience, and want to learn how to design software

effectively under Unix.

如果你具有Unix初级水平，并且希望在操作系统上达到中级水平，但是你几乎没有开发经验，并且你想学习在Unix下开发软件，那么，你应该读这本书。

You should read this book if you are a non-Unix programmer who has figured out that the Unix

tradition might have something to teach you. We believe you’re right, and that the Unix philosophy

can be exported to other operating systems. So we will pay more attention to non-Unix environments

(especially Microsoft operating systems) than is usual in a Unix book; and when tools and case

studies are portable, we say so.

如果你是一个领会到了Unix传统可能会教你很多东西的非Unix程序员，你应该读这本书。我们相信你是对的，并且Unix的思想对到其他的操作系统同样适用。所以较一般的Unix书而言我们更加重视非Unix环境（尤其是微软操作系统），并且当工具和个案研究变得轻松时，我们也这么说。

You should read this book if you are an application architect considering platforms or implementation strategies for a major general-market or vertical application. It will help you understand the strengths of Unix as a development platform, and of the Unix tradition of open source as a development method.

如果你是一个系统构架师，你正在考虑主流市场或顶级应用的应用平台和实现策略，你应该读这本书。它帮有助于你理解作为一个开发平台Unix的力量和Unix以开源作为发展方法的魅力。

You should not read this book if what you are looking for is the details of C coding or how to use

the Unix kernel API. There are many good books on these topics; Advanced Programming in the

Unix Environment [Stevens92] is classic among explorations of the Unix API, and The Practice of

Programming [Kernighan-Pike99] is recommended reading for all C programmers (indeed for all

programmers in any language).

如果你正在寻找C语言编码的细节或者怎样使用Unix核心API，那么你不应该读这本书。关于这些主题有很多好书。《Unix环境高级编程》[Stevens92]是Unix API 书籍中的杰作，《编程实践》[Kernighan-Pike99]是所有C程序员的推荐读物（实际上是使用任何一种语言的程序员）。

How to Use This Book

怎样使用这本书

This book is both practical and philosophical. Some parts are aphoristic and general, others will examine specific case studies in Unix development. We will precede or follow general principles and aphorisms with examples that illustrate them: examples drawn not from toy demonstration programs but rather from real working code that is in use every day.

这本书既实用，而且富有哲学思想。有些部分是格言和总结，其他的则是Unix开发的详细个例研究。我们在一般的原理和概括讲解后举实例加以说明。例子并不是来源于玩具例子，而是我们每天用到的实际工作代码。

We have deliberately avoided filling the book with lots of code or specification-file examples, even though in many places this might have made it easier to write (and in some places perhaps easier to read!). Most books about programming give too many low-level details and examples, but fail at giving the reader a high-level feel for what is really going on. In this book, we prefer to err in the opposite direction.

我们刻意的避免在书中充满大量的代码和详细文件例子，即使在很多地方如果这样做将会写起来很容易(而且很多地方这样更容易读)。大多数设计的书给了太多低级的实例，以致在怎样才能给读者一个高的水平的感觉却很失败。在这本书里，我们宁愿在这方面犯错误。

Therefore, while you will often be invited to read code and specification files, relatively few are

actually included in the book. Instead, we point you at examples on the Web.

所以，当你经常被邀请读代码和详细的文件时，这本书实际上包括很少这方面的资料。相反，我们指出了网上在哪儿有这些例子。

Absorbing these examples will help solidify the principles you learn into semi-instinctive working knowledge. Ideally, you should read this book near the console of a running Unix system, with a Web browser handy. Any Unix will do, but the software case studies are more likely to be preinstalled and immediately available for inspection on a Linux system. The pointers in the book are invitations to browse and experiment. Introduction of these pointers is paced so that wandering off to explore for a while won’t break up exposition that has to be continuous.

这些有趣的例子对你学得一知半解的知识将是很好的巩固。理论上，在你读这本书的时候，应该在Unix系统的控制台旁，而且旁边还有web浏览器的帮助。任何Unix系统都可以，但是这些软件个例研究在Linux系统下会变得更适合。本书中的指示器要求你浏览并进行实践。这些指示器的介绍离主题远了些，但是并不会割裂本书的连续性。

Note: while we have made every effort to cite URLs that should remain stable and usable, there is no way we can guarantee this. If you find that a cited link has gone stale, use common sense and do a phrase search with your favorite Web search engine. Where possible we suggest ways to do this near the URLs we cite.

注意：当我们试图引用网址时，应该保持它是稳定的和可用的，然而事实上我们没有方法保证这一点。如果你发现一个链接不可用，根据常识可以用你喜欢的web搜索引擎查找。当我们在引用网址附近我们经常这样建议。

Most abbreviations used in this book are expanded at first use. For convenience, we have also provided a glossary in an appendix.

本书的大多数缩写在第一次使用时都是全称。为了方便，我们也在附录中提供了术语表。

References are usually by author name. Numbered footnotes are for URLs that would intrude on

the text or that we suspect might be perishable; also for asides, war stories, and jokes.2

参考经常标以作者的名字。大量的可能过期或不可用的网址都标了脚注，战争故事和笑话也是如此。

To make this book more accessible to less technical readers, we invited some non-programmers to

read it and identify terms that seemed both obscure and necessary to the flow of exposition. We

also use footnotes for definitions of elementary terms that an experienced programmer is unlikely to

need.

为了让这本书对技术薄弱的读者更加适用，我们邀请了一些非程序员读它，并要么模棱两可要么需要解释的术语做出标注。我们也使用了一些对有经验的程序员来说可能不需要的脚注解释术语。

Related References

相关参考资料

Some famous papers and a few books by Unix’s early developers have mined this territory before. Kernighan & Pike’s The Unix Programming Environment [Kernighan-Pike84] stands out among these and is rightly considered a classic. But today it shows its age a bit; it doesn’t cover the Internet, and the World Wide Web or the new wave of interpreted languages like Perl, Tcl, and Python.

早期一些涉及这些领域的Unix开发者写的论文和书籍。Kernighan 和 Pike的《Unix编程环境》[Kernighan-Pike84]就是他们的杰出代表，将其视作经典最恰当不过了。但是今天它显得有点老，它并没有覆盖到Internet、万维网或解释语言的浪潮，例如Perl，Tcl 和 Python。

About halfway into the composition of this book, we learned of Mike Gancarz’s The Unix Philosophy

[Gancarz]. This book is excellent within its range, but did not attempt to cover the full spectrum

of topics we felt needed to be addressed. Nevertheless we are grateful to the author for the reminder

that the very simplest Unix design patterns have been the most persistent and successful ones.

在本书中有一部分，我们学习了Mike Gancarz的书《Unix思想》[Gancarz]。这本在它涉及的范围里是相当优秀的，可惜它并没有尝试覆盖到我们认为应该提到的全部主题。但是作者对Unix设计模式中最简单的成型的、成功的例子的暗示，我们非常感激。

The Pragmatic Programmer [Hunt-Thomas] is a witty and wise disquisition on good design practice pitched at a slightly different level of the software-design craft (more about coding, less about higher level partitioning of problems) than this book. The authors’ philosophy is an outgrowth of Unix experience, and it is an excellent complement to this book.

《程序员的修炼之道》[Hunt-Thomas]是一本关于好的设计习惯的书，它写得很诙谐，很博学。跟这本书相比，它在软件设计工艺上倾向的水平不同（更多的是编码，问题的高水平分割比较少）。作者的思想是Unix经验的产物，这是这本书优秀的补充。

The Practice of Programming [Kernighan-Pike99] covers some of the same ground as The Pragmatic

Programmer from a position deep within the Unix tradition.

《编程实践》[Kernighan-Pike99]覆盖了《程序员的修炼之道》的一些相同的Unix传统的深入研究。

Finally (and with admitted intent to provoke) we recommend Zen Flesh, Zen Bones [Reps-Senzaki], an important collection of Zen Buddhist primary sources. References to Zen are scattered throughout this book. They are included because Zen provides a vocabulary for addressing some ideas that turn out to be very important for software design but are otherwise very difficult to hold in the mind. Readers with religious attachments are invited to consider Zen not as a religion but as a therapeutic form of mental discipline—which, in its purest non-theistic forms, is exactly what Zen is.

最后(带有一定目的)，我们推荐《禅、肉体和尸体》 [Reps-Senzaki]，一个重要的宗教集合来源。这本书中零零散散的提到了禅，它们被包含在书中是因为他们提供的表达词汇很多在软件设计上非常重要，但是其他的很难把握。建议有宗教信仰的读者不要认为禅是一个宗教，而是一个纯无神论的精神医疗剂，这是它的真正所在。

Conventions Used in This Book

本书的约定

The term “UNIX” is technically and legally a trademark of The Open Group, and should formally be used only for operating systems which are certified to have passed The Open Group’s elaborate standards-conformance tests. In this book we use “Unix” in the looser sense widely current among programmers, to refer to any operating system (whether formally Unix-branded or not) that is either genetically descended from Bell Labs’s ancestral Unix code or written in close imitation of its descendants. In particular, Linux (from which we draw most of our examples) is a Unix under this definition.

术语UNIX是开源组织的合法商标，并且应该正规的仅仅用在被开源组织经过严格测试的操作系统中。在这本书里，当涉及到无论是贝尔实验室产生的原始Unix代码还是其后来的变种的操作系统（无论是否是正规的Unix商标）我们在一种比较宽松的环境里用Unix。特别说明，Linux（我们就是用它表述了很多例子）就符合这个定义。

This book employs the Unix manual page convention of tagging Unix facilities with a following manual section in parentheses, usually on first introduction when we want to emphasize that this is a Unix command. Thus, for example, read “munger(1)” as “the ‘munger’ program, which will be documented in section 1 (user tools) of the Unix manual pages, if it’s present on your system.” Section 2 is C system calls, section 3 is C library calls, section 5 is file formats and protocols, section 8 is system administration tools. Other sections vary among Unixes but are not cited in this book. For more, type man 1 man at your Unix shell prompt (older System V Unixes may require man –s 1 man).

这本书为了标签Unix方便，借用了Unix指南页并用圆括号表明，通常在我们第一次介绍我们强调这是一个Unix命名的时候。这样，例如，读“munger(1)”作为“munger”程序，在Unix手册的第一部分说明，如果Unix手册在你的系统上存在的话。第二部分是C系统调用，第三部分是C库调用，第五部分是文件格式和协议，第八部分是系统管理工具。其他的部分在Unixes之间变化，但是在本书中并没有引用。更多，在你的Unix系统下输入man 1 man shell命令（在更老的系统V Unixes上可能是man –s 1 man）。

Sometimes we mention a Unix application (such as Emacs, without a manual-section suffix and capitalized. This is a clue that the name actually represents a well-established family of Unix programs with essentially the same function, and we are discussing generic properties of all of them. Emacs, for example, includes xemacs.

有些时候我们谈到Unix应用（例如Emacs）没有没有手册段落后缀和大写起始字母。这是一个线索，名字确实代表了确定的Unix程序家族，本质上是相同的函数，并且我们讨论他们所有的属性。例如 Emacs包括xemacs。

At various points later in this book we refer to ‘old school’ and ‘new school’ methods. As with rap music, new-school starts about 1990. In this context, it’s associated with the rise of scripting languages, GUIs, open-source Unixes, and the Web. Old-school refers to the pre-1990 (and especially pre-1985) world of expensive (shared) computers, proprietary Unixes, scripting in shell, and C everywhere. This difference is worth pointing out because cheaper and less memory constrained machines have wrought some significant changes on the Unix programming style.

本书中，在各种不同的点后我们涉及“老学校”和“新学校”方法。像快板歌一样，“新学校”开始于大约1990年。在这个过程中，随着脚本语言、GUIs、开源Unixes和Web的壮大，与他们相关联。“老学校”涉及到1990年之前(尤其是1985年之前)昂贵的电脑、所有的Unixes、shell中的脚本 和 无处不在的C。值得指出的不同点是便宜和更小的内存促进了Unix程序风格的一些重要的改变。

Our Case Studies

我们的个例研究

A lot of books on programming rely on toy examples constructed specifically to prove a point. This one won’t. Our case studies will be real, pre-existing pieces of software that are in production use every day. Here are some of the major ones:

许多程序设计的书依靠构造玩具例子来支持他的论点，这本书没有这么做。我们的个例研究将是真正的、我们在用的软件作品中的部分。这儿列出了主要的几个。

cdrtools/xcdroast These two separate projects are usually used together. The cdrtools package is a set of CLI tools for writing CD-ROMs; Web search for “cdrtools”. The xcdroast application is a GUI front end for cdrtools; see the xcdroast project site [http://www.xcdroast.org/].

cdrtools/xcdroast 这2个相关的项目通常一起使用。cdrtools工具包是一系列CLI关于写CD-ROM的CLI工具集；通过网络搜索“cdrtools”。xcdroast应用是一个使用cdrtools的GUI前端；参考xcdroast工程站点[http://www.xcdroast.org/]。

Fetchmail The fetchmail program retrieves mail from remote-mail servers using the POP3 or IMAP post-office protocols. See the fetchmail home page [http://www.catb.org/~esr/fetchmail] (or search for “fetchmail” on the Web).

Fetchmail Fetchmail程序利用POP3和IMAP邮局协议从远端邮件服务器收回mail.请查看Fetchmail的主页。[http://www.catb.org/~esr/fetchmail]（或在网上查找“fetchmail”）