On Thu 3 Dec 2020, 20:43 Larry McVoy, <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 03, 2020 at 09:37:17PM +0100, Niklas Karlsson wrote:
> Den tors 3 dec. 2020 kl 21:32 skrev M Douglas McIlroy <
> m.douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>:
>
> > There's a back story. The paper appears in the proceedings  of a
> > conference held in London in 1973, a few months after the advent of
> > pipes. While preparing the presentation, Ken was inspired to invent
> > and install the pipe operator. His talk wouldn't have been nearly as
> > compelling had it been expressed in the original pipeline syntax (for
> > which I take the blame).
> >
>
> Now I'm curious. Is there anywhere I can read about the original pipeline
> syntax? I tried searching a bit, but the only mention that was even vaguely
> informative only stated that > was involved.

Wasn't there a version that was

        cat whatever ^ wc -l

?

Yes, that's it. And you'll still find[1] that /bin/sh on (at least?) Solaris honors that syntax. That's one reason why the git test suite fails on Solaris without being pushed to use a modern shell implementation.

Thanks
-Ben

[1] At least up to Solaris 10. I've not used newer.