unix-v6

It's not broken, but it is misnamed. This is because it is not intended to work with the same kind of string that the other str* functions work with (ie. an ordinary null terminated string). Instead it's supposed to work with fixed-width string fields that pad out values shorter than the field width with nulls. This is how original UNIX directory entries were stored. See how the name is copied into u.u_dbuf here: https://github.com/hephaex/unix-v6/blob/daa355109625a50e6b10...

It appears that only calloc was in Lesk's Portable C Library [0] while malloc was the name Thompson gave the kernel's memory allocator in V6 [1]. When Ritchie rewrote Lesk's library for V7, he may have simply retained calloc for backward compatibility with existing user space code. [0] http://roguelife.org/~fujita/COOKIES/HISTORY/V6/iolib.html [1] https://github.com/hephaex/unix-v6/blob/master/ken/malloc.c

What UNIX called an inode is unfortunately not what Linux now calls an inode. That thing might have better names, but we are stuck with it. How so? Here's a v6 on-disk inode: https://github.com/hephaex/unix-v6/blob/master/ino.h and here's an ext4 on-disk inode: http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/fs/ext4/ext4.h#L704 The latter is considerably larger, to be sure, but still contains all of the fields from the former (many of them with the same name!).