System 5 porting

[Scott Barman]

 In article <9100014 at m.cs.uiuc.edu> carey at m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
 >We have almost all bsd machines, and a few system 5 machines.
 >I have done some porting of software from the bsd systems to system 5.
 >But I have never really kept track of the problems I have run into.
 >If I had to tell some other programmer what the problems are, about
 >all I could say is "they ain't the same."
 >
 >Does anyone have a short summary of basic differences?  Not all the
 >gory details, please, I am sure that could take up volumes.  Just
 >something that lists the system calls that are missing from system 5,
 >major differences in results of calls, differences in commands,
 >and so on.
 >
 >I don't think I am the only one who would like to have such a list.

Instead of a list (which is lengthy) let me give you my source:

	"Portable C and Unix System Programming"
	by J.E. Lapin, Rabbit Software
	1987, Prentice-Hall	ISBN 0-13-686494-5

First, let me say the book is a little behind (i.e. it does not cover
System V Release 3 or much of the changes in 4.3bsd because of when
it was published).  But I bought it in 1987 (it was around $25 then)
because I was writting software that had to run under SunOS 3.4 and
a pre-divestature version of System V (I was a consultant at Bellcore).
It contains sections on portable coding practices, a "standard" at C
coding (this was pre-ANSI), and some other tidbits.  It also contains
many pages on the differences in programs, systems calls, functions,
etc.  What makes it nice is it covers everything from Version 7 to
4.1bsd to 4.2bsd to System V Release 2 and the different versions of
Xenix (up to 5.0).

The folks at Rabbit Software did a good job (J.E. Lapin is not a real
person.  "The name represents the many individuals at Rabbit...") and it
seems to be worth it for those who have to program under different
versions of Unix.

I hope that helps.

-- 
scott barman
{gatech, emory}!dtscp1!scott