Re: [TUHS] Bourne shell and comments

This is all very interesting. Back when I was in high school, I exploited a daemon on the PDP-10 we used. MIC. It allowed you to basically run a "shell script" using a PTY as yourself, and it would generate a log, and you could peruse it at your leisure. The exploit had to do with the fact that PTYs had special privileges because of some custom security alterations the consulting firm made to TOPS-10. After the consulting firm got wind of what I did, they asked me to write a replacement that was more secure. While the original MIC had a lot of functionality in it, including labels like GOTHERE: (not the trailing colon), and it was used to compile the monitor (TOPS-10), they just needed something quick-and-dirty that students could use that wouldn't open up a security hole. I basically just forced the script into the terminals input buffer and let the monitor execute it line-by-line, instead of using a PTY. So while I was creating this new MIC, I figured why not put the colon at the beginning of the line, it was easier to find on-the-fly. Imagine my surprise when I got into DOS a year or two later and they used leading colons for labels in batch files. Not having any access whatsoever to any flavor of UNIX at the time, this is the first I've heard that leading colons were used for labels outside of DOS and my MIC-lite :) On 4/19/2017 2:36 PM, Stephen Kitt wrote: