David A. Wheeler's Personal Home Page
Visit dwheeler.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jan 2009 – Oct 2025
Software Engineering 8Tools & Productivity 2Systems & Performance 2Security & Privacy 2Programming Languages 2History & Retro Computing 1
The entire book revolves around the "nine rules." After the typical introduction and list of the rules, there's one chapter for each rule. Each of these chapters describes the rule, explains why it's a rule, and includes several "sub-rules" that explain how to apply the rule. Most importantly, there are lots of "war…
This article explains how to correctly handle filenames in Bourne shells (the primary shell of Unix/Linux/POSIX systems), based on the issues discussed in 'Fixing Unix/Linux/Filenames'. Many programs fail to work properly on filenames that include spaces, begin with dash (-), include newlines, and so on, because…
This paper identifies the most important innovations in software, removing hardware advances and products that didn't embody significant new software innovations. Its results may surprise you.
This article will try to convince you that adding some limitations on legal Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames would be an improvement. Many programs already presume these limitations, the POSIX standard already permits such limitations, and many Unix/Linux filesystems already embed such limitations so it'd be better to make…
Description of what we have learned
David A. Wheeler's Page on Countering 'Trusting Trust' through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) - Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers