Documented Unix Facilities over 48 Years

Abstract

The documented Unix facilities data set provides the details regarding the evolution of 15596 unique facilities through 93 versions of Unix over a period of 48 years. It is based on the manual transcription of early scanned documents, on the curation of text obtained through optical character recognition, and on the automatic extraction of data from code available on the Unix History Repository. The data are categorized into user commands, system calls, C library functions, devices and special files, file formats and conventions, games et. al., miscellanea, system maintenance procedures and commands, and system kernel interfaces. A timeline view allows the visualization of the evolution across releases. The data can be used for empirical research regarding API evolution, system design, as well as technology adoption and trends.