Heirloom Project
   [1]==> Home
   [2]--> Toolchest
   [3]--> Bourne Shell
   [4]--> Documentation Tools
   [5]--> Development Tools
   [6]--> mailx
   [7]--> Packaging Tools
   [8]--> vi

The Heirloom Project

   The Heirloom Project provides traditional implementations of standard Unix
   utilities. In many cases, they have been derived from original Unix material
   released as Open Source by [9]Caldera and [10]Sun.

   Interfaces follow traditional practice; they remain generally compatible with
   System V, although extensions that have become common use over the course of time
   are sometimes provided. Most utilities are also included in a variant that aims
   at POSIX conformance.

   On the interior, technologies for the twenty-first century such as the UTF-8
   character encoding or OpenType fonts are supported.

   The project includes the following components:
     * [11]The Heirloom Toolchest: awk, cpio, grep, tar, etc.
     * [12]The Heirloom Bourne Shell
     * [13]The Heirloom Documentation Tools: nroff, troff, dpost, etc.
     * [14]The Heirloom Development Tools: lex, yacc, m4, and SCCS
     * [15]Heirloom mailx
     * [16]The Heirloom Packaging Tools: pkgadd, pkgmk, etc.

   --Why? Some people like to drive classic cars, others like to arrange their
   domiciles with period furniture. The Heirloom Project caters to people who like
   to operate their computers using a traditional Unix command line interface. The
   Heirloom Project is not a software museum; it does not attempt to preserve
   utilities unmodified. Rather, it keeps stylistic, algorithmic, and interface
   aspects intact while modernizing the framework as appropriate.

   For example, the Heirloom Project provides the grep family of utilities with its
   traditional algorithm implementations, as they have appeared in the computer
   science literature: a [17]grep utility with the NFA simulation originally derived
   from [18]ed, an [19]egrep utility with a directly constructed DFA simulation, and
   a [20]fgrep utility with the original implementation of the Aho-Corasick
   algorithm. All of them have been modernized to support multibyte characters, have
   been relieved of static limits to the complexity of expressions, and have been
   embedded in a common framework that supports lines of unlimited length, recursive
   search in a directory hierarchy, and transparent handling of compressed files.
   Additionally, a POSIX-style [21]grep utility is available; it uses the same
   framework with the regular expression library originating from SVR4.2MP.

   Another example is the [22]cpio utility, which keeps the traditional interface
   but has been rewritten with machine-independent read-write support for almost all
   known Unix archiving formats as well as zip archives. Again, as a tribute to
   POSIX, the same functionality is available with a [23]pax utility.

   In effect, the Heirloom Project makes it possible to perform today's work in a
   traditional Unix manner.
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Links

   Stefan Tramm maintains a [24]Mac OS X port of the Heirloom Project.
     ____________________________________________________________________________


    Gunnar Ritter  2007-01-05
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   [26]SourceForge.net Logo

References

   1. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/index.html
   2. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/tools.html
   3. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/sh.html
   4. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html
   5. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/devtools.html
   6. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html
   7. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/pkgtools.html
   8. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/vi.html
   9. http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Caldera-license.pdf
  10. http://www.opensolaris.org/
  11. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/tools.html
  12. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/sh.html
  13. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html
  14. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/devtools.html
  15. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html
  16. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/pkgtools.html
  17. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/man/grep.1.html
  18. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/man/ed.1.html
  19. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/man/egrep.1.html
  20. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/man/fgrep.1.html
  21. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/man/grep.1.html
  22. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/man/cpio.1.html
  23. https://heirloom.sourceforge.net/man/pax.1.html
  24. http://homepage.mac.com/stefan.tramm/iWiki/HeirloomNotes.html
  25. mailto:gunnarr@acm.org
  26. http://sourceforge.net/projects/heirloom