Program design in the UNIX environment

Introduction

This repo contains Brian Kernighan's and Rob Pike's famous paper on program design from the 1984 Bell Systems Technical Journal (BSTJ) issue on UNIX.

I reconstituted the troff source from a PostScript file obtained from Stanley Leiber. This file had a few problems, which I have fixed.

Formatting instructions, differences and fixes from the original PostScript and acknowledgements are in comments at the front of the file.

With the addition of -r tj=1 on the groff command line, the document will include the section headings and author biographies that were in the 1984 Bell Labs Technical Journal article.

I'm making it available since it's a famous document for which it would be a shame to only have not-quite-correct PostScript.

Contents

• README.md - This file.
• prog.mac - Macros for formatting examples, borrowed from CSTR 100.
• unix_prog_design.ms - The troff source for the memorandum.
• unix_prog_design.ps - The original PostScript version.

Last Updated:

Tue Jul 7 08:59:55 AM IDT 2026