What is the meaning of *nix?

ruby linux unix operating-system
Cristiano Fontes picture Cristiano Fontes · Jan 17, 2011 · Viewed 53.7k times · Source

What is the meaning of *nix, and what is its relation with Ruby?

Just saw that in an interview question... I think there is something to do with UNIX distros, but I am not sure.

Could not find it here or in the Wikipedia, so I am asking.

What is the meaning ?

And what is its relation with Ruby ? because the question was about Ruby.

Answer

DSimon picture DSimon · Jan 17, 2011

*nix just means operating systems that are like the old workhorse Unix. Some examples include Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X (its kernel, Darwin, is based on BSD).

The main relation between *nix and Ruby is just a pragmatic one; most Ruby developers seem to prefer to work on Unix-like OSes (typically Linux or Mac OS X). There's no official relationship, and it's quite possible to work with Ruby on non-*nix OSes like Windows.

Related questions

Create a daemon with double-fork in Ruby

What is the proper way to create a well-behaved Unix or Linux daemon in Ruby? What is the definition of a well-behaved daemon anyway, and how would one write such a program in Ruby?

Read More
Gem Command not found

I have installed gem on Ubuntu 10.10 32 bit with apt-get install gem -y But when I try to run gem install something.gem I get the error of the command not being found. bash: gem: command not found I installed gem, …

Read More
Installing rmagick on Ubuntu

I'm trying to get RMagick setup on Ubuntu 10.04. Looked here but had no joy. I even compiled and installed ImageMagick from source, but the instructions here still didn't help me when I try to install RMagick using RubyGems. I got …

Read More