23 Jul
2022
23 Jul
'22
5:20 p.m.
On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 7:03 AM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.