Re: [TUHS] BSD mail(1) line addressing

stanley lieber <sl(a)stanleylieber.com> wrote: |Anyone know what considerations informed the decision (way back when) \ |to eschew ed-like line addressing and switch to the currently entrenched, \ |reversed |form? | |EXAMPLES | |V8 mail: | |1,5p # prints messages one through five | |BSD mail: | |p1-5 # prints messages one through five I cannot see any code that would parse the command line, let aside an ed-style one, in V7 usr/src/cmd/mail.c. But interesting question, why that prefix-based command syntax has been thrown over board. Maybe, even likely i would say, Kurt Shoens didn't even do so, what the question implies, but instead the message specification is the actual argument for the command, instead of being just an address constrained of it. For some commands this is a restriction, however, which is why the laststring() (former getcmd()) has been introduced in the nail fork. It backward parses something off the end of the command line, to overcome ambiguities that would otherwise arise, e.g., the `pipe' command takes a message-list and a command. This is of course a very bad hack. Parsing the message-list should be prepared for not failing once the shell command is reached, and the shell long has the "--" mechanism for such separating purposes. nail(1) has not, maybe mailx(1) will, one day. --steffen