[RichardCA]

OK I have a question. I've been trying to track down a Unix book that was similar from that time period, covering command-line tools and shell programming. It had some funny cartoons in between the text. One particular cartoon featured a man who had spent too much time at the command line and was using single-word commands for everything, e.g. when he needed to send a letter he would point to it and say "MAIL" and when someone knocked on his door he would point to it and say "ENTER". Does anyone else remember that one?

[ferguess_k]

Asked ChatGPT and it told me the book might be "The Unix Programming Environment". It happens that the second link on Google is a pdf so I took a brief look, but did not find any cartoon. I asked it a second time and it said "UNIX for the Impatient", which does look like the one but I didn't find any pdf. Hopefully it helps.

[RichardCA]

Thanks but no, everyone who came up in that era knew about K&P (K&R was the C book). The main publishers back then were O'Reilly, SAMS, QUE and a few others. I think it was a SAMS book but I'm not sure.

A more likely candidate is the Kochan book but the original 1985 first edition. It had the scrappy sense of humor that characterized the Unix culture in the 80's.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/293206.UNIX_Shell_Progra...