23 Jul
2022
23 Jul
'22
2 p.m.
On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 7:20 AM John Cowan <cowan(a)ccil.org> wrote:
On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 7:03 AM Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, but awk wasn't widely available until 7th edition. I imagine work
on it began before `num` in 2BSD, but few outside of Bell Labs would
have seen it prior to 1978 or so.
I wonder if the use-case was just sufficiently rare that no one felt like
building a special tool and it was just done on an ad-hoc basis, if
necessary.
- Dan C.
It may be worth noting that BSD had `cat -n` in
4BSD by October, 1980:
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4BSD/usr/man/man1/cat.1
That may explain the relatively late incorporation of `nl` in, at least, the BSD lineage.
An obvious approach, which would leave no real traces in documentation, would be:
$ awk '{print NR, $0}'
A more precise emulation would be more of a pain to type:
$ awk '{printf("%6d\t%s\n", NR, $0)}'
but perfectly usable in a script.