Today in 1983, "Beat It" by Michael Jackson may have topped the charts, but a slight bug in the *dir() library was found only a few days ago by OpenBSD developer Marc Balmer (no rela -- oh, wait). OS News has the entire amusing tale of the bug in BSD (the UNIX foundation of Mac OS X) that's been alive and kicking for nearly 25 years. Balmer contacted Marshall Kirk McKusick, the original developer of the *dir() library, who confirmed the error.

Thankfully, the fix was simple, but Balmer kidded, "[s]orry that it took us almost 25 years to fix it."

Thanks, Cameron!

Back when the Intel Macs first appeared there was a delay from Apple in releasing Darwin 8, the open-source BSD/Unix foundation of Tiger. Crazy theories were adduced, and bad intentions attributed to Apple, but eventually Darwin 8 for Intel Macs was released. Apple seems to have moved even faster with OS X 10.5, and just a couple of weeks after the commercial release of Leopard, Darwin 9.0 is now available at Apple's Darwin page. So if you've ever wanted to root around in the source for the foundations of Leopard, here's your chance.

[via Digg]

iPhone developer NerveGas has updated his BSD subsystem in preparation for the new iPhone jailbreak. This new release offers tighter code fixes ("less cruft"), a few additions and a few omissions of less useful items. He also removed libarmfp dependencies. In other words, this release brings iPhone users closer to the standard BSD world.

Among other changes, NerveGas has rebuilt the kext tools, added reboot, mknod, a working chown and vmstat. Other new items include chflags, lsvfs, mkfifo (and friends), tee, renice, and cap_mkdb. You might notice one big missing item: minicom. NerveGas will be releasing minicom as a separate package. NerveGas has also updated ssh.