Running Plan 9 Userland Tools On Unix

This document described how to set up a typical GNU/Linux system for running rc shell scripts that expect Plan 9 userland tools.

Plan 9 is an operating system developed at Bell Labs, able to be somewhat shallowly described as Unix done right. The standard tools (ls, cat, sed, etc) seem crude at first, having much less features than their modern GNU (and often BSD) incarnations, along with gratuitous shallow incompatibilities, but that merely reflects the Plan 9 (and Unix) philosophy of highly specialised nonbloated tools, not an actual technical deficiency.

The Plan 9 from User Space project has ported a large amount of the Plan 9 userspace to Unix, including the standard tools, and constructed “culturally compatible” replacements for some of the parts that could not reasonably be ported (such as the display system). If you are merely interested in running shell scripts expecting a Plan 9 toolset (such as most everything under /hacks, the much more lightweight 9base package contains only a subset of the full toolset, namely those most useful for shell scripting. I attempt to ensure that all my scripts use only what can be found in 9base.

Setting up 9base

Debian contains the 9base package in its archives (although beware that the version may be out of date and missing important programs). This package will install most of its contents in /usr/lib/plan9/, with binaries in /usr/lib/plan9/bin. The manual pages will be in the standard directories, although prefixed with plan9- (so you would invoke man plan9-sed to read about the sed in 9base). It appears a semi-standard to have a $PLAN9 environment variable point at /usr/lib/plan9/ (if you install 9base manually, you should change this value, of course). You can set this environment variable globally by adding the following to /etc/environment:

PLAN9=/usr/lib/plan9

This will have no harmful effects. On the other hand, globally making $PLAN9/bin the head of your $PATH will most likely cause your system to break, as the system maintenance scripts assume a GNU userland. A good rc shell script should manually change its path to prefer $PLAN9/bin.

The most important binary in 9base is rc, the Plan 9 command shell, and it will have to be accessible through $PATH for shebang-lines (the #!/usr/bin/env rc at the first line of a shell script) to work. It may be easiest to simply copy rc to /bin, although it should also be safe to add $PLAN9/bin to the very end of your $PATH, for example by putting the following in your .bashrc:

PATH=$PATH:$PLAN9/bin

The choice of .bashrc over /etc/environment means that the setting will be user-local, although making this the global setting would be harmless.