5 Jan
2020
5 Jan
'20
7:49 a.m.
v7 Bourne shell does not appear to treat '#' as a comment.
I've built termlib and curses for v7 and am now trying to find a small
screen editor. I was trying se, but the version I have ships as a shell
archive, and it doesn't actually unpack on v7, in part because of the
comments.
v7 is a target in Jove's Ovmakefile, so that's what I'm trying now.
Slow-pasting uuencoded files into the terminal is gross, but efficacious....
Adam
On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 5:48 PM Eric Allman <tuhs(a)eric.allman.name> wrote:
I contacted Steve --- he is on the list, and says
he'll weigh in.
eric
On 2020-01-04 13:06, Jon Steinhart wrote:
Dave Horsfall writes:
> On Sat, 4 Jan 2020, markus schnalke wrote:
>
>> My question was not about the use cases for ``>file'' but *why* it
was
>> made a simple command. Let me explain:
>>
>> One creates an empty file or truncates a file with:
>>
>> >file
>>
>> why not with:
>>
>> :>file
>> ?
>>
>> To me it looks to be the more sensible ... more regular way.
>
> The Unix philosophy, perhaps i.e. keep it simple? Why have ":" (an
actual
internal
Shell command) when "" (the null command) will do the job?
I guess only the Bell Labs bods here can answer this.
-- Dave
Don't know if Steve Bourne is on this list, but he's been a great source
of information when I've had questions about why the shell did things the
way it did.
Jon