2015-05-03 Today and yesterday, I wrote on a text on cut(1). It's still work in progress, but I was making progress. During this work, I in- vestigated deeper in the various Unix standards, for the first time. Now, I understand much better what SVID is and how it is related to the System V releases. Apart from that (and most im- portant) I researched much about POSIX, its history, its struc- ture, the various influences from an to other standards. I caneven put X/OPEN into the great picture (and know what it ist). All this was a huge step forward in my understanding of Unix. (I noted down some of the information including links to standards, if online. [0] I hope that this will stop my regular search for those links.) There are several much too unknown man pages in section 7. One is on Unix standards: standards(7). I was a bit surprised to discover a feature of printf(3) that is either new to me or I have completely forgotten about it: You can use the precision for strings directives to cut the string after that much characters: printf("%.10s0, s); This can be used with printf(1) as well, and can thus replace cut(1) in such cases: printf "%.10s0 "$longvar" (Unsurprisingly, I don't care if bash has a substring function and how it would be used.) Following up on the discussions with Michi, I wrote down some thoughts on FizzBuzz. [1] [0] http://marmaro.de/rem/unix/standards/ [1] http://marmaro.de/rem/texte/fizzbuzz http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke