This directory contains a copy of John Lions' “A commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System”. This form of the document is the one that Warren Toomey published on the USENET alt.folklore.computers newsgroup in May 1994, with corrections supplied by Brian Foley in 2014 and incorporated into the source by Conway Yee in August 2023. It's available in several forms:

• The book in PDF, for printing out or displaying directly.

• The source form of the book, with a Makefile and targets to build PostScript and PDF versions.

In addition, there are older files which may be of historical interest:

• A gzipped tarball of the files after I had unpacked them and formatted them to PostScript in June 1994. This tarball includes separate PostScript files for the odd and even pages, for printing out in a double-sided format. It also contains a PDF file generated in April 2004.

• The errata that Brian Foley submitted in 2014.

With the update in 2023, I have removed the individual source files and the PostScript version of the book. It can still be built from source if necessary.

Doubtless there are still errors in the document, mainly scan errors. If you find one, please let me know.

Other resources

The source code to 6th Edition Unix is not included, but you can get that from TUHS, also courtesy of Warren Toomey. There is also an older version at cuzco.com, I haven't compared them to the line numbers in the Commentary. You can also find scans of the Commentary and the source code at Bitsavers.org.

In addition, this site contains a reformatted version of the Commentary with many links to the corresponding source. I haven't been able to establish who is responsible for it.

Will Senn has generated a searchable version of the original sources.

Doubtless there are other resources. If you know of one worth mentioning, please let me know.