The 'learn' utility from BSD 4.3

astyle

astyle

Background: At work, I came across a book titled "The Waite Group's UNIX Primer Plus"... it's apparently a 1995 publication (ISBN 0-672-22729-0) that covers UNIX v. 4.3. A nice piece of history!

Discussion: As I started reading it, I came across a utility called 'learn'... it's described on p. 65 of that book. It is apparently a command-line, interactive utility. To partially quote the book:
When you invoke 'learn', the system gives you an interactive lesson at your terminal. It presents information, asks questions, and tells you whether your answers are correct.

To use this utility, type
Code: 
% learn
These are the available courses-
    C
    editor
    eqn
    files
    macros
    morefiles
If you want more information about the courses, or if you have never used 'learn' before, type 'return'; otherwise type the name of the course you want, followed by 'return'.
Click to expand...

Question: I tried to do a bit of research. I know that FreeBSD's manpages do include manpages for the utility, but only for 4 sets of manpages (2.8 BSD, 2.9.1 BSD, 2.10 BSD, and 2.11 BSD), (and NOT 4.3 BSD or 4.4 BSD as that book claims)... here's the URL where I took the screenie. This 'learn' utility is not in base or in ports for present-day FreeBSD. So my question is: Does anyone know if there's an Open Source project that maintained that utility?
1699914389093.png
 
I used to use it as a teaching tool many years ago. I recall porting it to both System III and System V. And it was great for teaching basics. I suspect that it would be pretty easy to get running again today.
 
gpw928 said:
I used to use it as a teaching tool many years ago. I recall porting it to both System III and System V. And it was great for teaching basics. I suspect that it would be pretty easy to get running again today.
Click to expand...
yeah, but that utility does not seem to be in ports... I just now checked Freshports, and the only listings with 'learn' in the name refer to APIs for Machine Learning. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to be a port maintainer for this thing, not at this time.
 
bakul said:
It's probably not very useful these days.
Click to expand...
I believe that would depend very much on the usage case. The original focus was to teach Unix basics to people who knew little about Unix, and as a self-help tool for beginners, it was quite good. It was cheap, easy to deploy, self-paced, and extensible. Each "lesson" was scripted, so adding new lessons on just about any subject that could be exercised by a shell script was relatively simple.
 
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