*BSD News Article 49506


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From: vixie@wisdom.home.vix.com (Paul A Vixie)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: Re: dbm or equivalent in BSDi ?
Date: 22 Aug 1995 01:34:57 GMT
Organization: Vixie Enterprises
Lines: 34
Message-ID: <VIXIE.95Aug21183457@wisdom.home.vix.com>
References: <richard-2108951808480001@island.interverse.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: wisdom.home.vix.com
In-reply-to: richard@interverse.com's message of Mon, 21 Aug 1995 18:08:48
	-0800

>Many unix systems have a very simple database feature called DBM or NDBM. 
>Our BSDi 2.0 out of the box does not seem to have this feature and my
>4.4BSD manual for O'Reilly mentions nothing by those names leading me to
>wonder if it even exists for BSD.  Perl has hooks that make it easy to use
>DBM (which has come in very handy when I was working around UNIX(r) System
>V Release 4 and IRIX Release 5.2).
>
>Does anyone know if there is an equivelent program for BSDi?

Well.  Um, yes.  Short answer: "man dbopen" will get you started; there is
an ndbm stub library built into the C Library of BSD/OS 2.0.  You can probably
just tell Perl to use dbopen directly, otherwise tell it to use ndbm and all
will be well.

But I find your wryly amusing, due to the history behind it.  Bell Labs put
something called "dbm" into V7 UNIX.  USL took it out in System III.  Berkeley
upgraded "dbm" into "ndbm" in BSD 4.3 (based on 32V which was based on V7.)
USL, feeling market pressure since System V didn't have "vi" or "csh" or any of
the things that made BSD usable, added a bunch of BSDisms in System V.3 and
then a bunch more (including Sendmail et al) in System V.4.  So now you tell me
that ndbm, which came from V7 but was abandoned by USL during the years BSD
was building its popularity, has been reinserted into SVR4.  I'll bet this
is not covered in Peter Salus's UNIX history book, which is too bad since it's
definitely an example of truth being stranger than fiction.

(BSD abandoned dbm and ndbm since they were encumbered with Bell Labs 32V code;
Margo Seltzer and Keith Bostic came up with "dbopen" which has a mode where it
can emulate dbm or ndbm; perhaps some day System V.5 will pick up "dbopen" and
help complete the loop.)
-- 
Paul Vixie
La Honda, CA			"Illegitimi non carborundum."
<paul@vix.com>
pacbell!vixie!paul		(dont let the bastards grind you down)