This is an excellent article that breaks down common pitfalls and provides really concise rules for preventing them. It's a great read if you're in to systems programming.
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Another stupendous reason to gpl uutils so that the decades of experence of hundreds of system programmers can be leveraged in the rewrite.
Those are bugs I dont think any programming language catch, unless it's a DSL for writing such programs on Linux or another OS.
It could be improved. Sebastian Wick and Lennart Poettering made comments on how hard POSIX makes it hard to be secure. There are better APIs that try to be safer.
- https://blog.sebastianwick.net/posts/how-hard-is-it-to-open-a-file/
- https://mastodon.social/@pid_eins/116459585811044061
And since uutils is not Linux only, it can't use these safer APIs directly, or at least not without writing more platform-specific code.
Some of them seem to be harder to fix or to get right in Rust than C though. Mostly due to "convenience" methods that make application writing easier.
As someone who is not at all into programming, this title made me genuinely think I had a stroke.