I was amused to see it come up in one of the olduse.net newsgroups I've been following. Interestingly, the SysIII version of cut.c does not have the line mentioned here. That's because it doesn't initialize _any_ of the flag variables. The line was added some time between then and SysV, and that is the _only_ significant change between the SysIII and pdp11v versions. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/net.bugs.usg/iAkgNVBJNSo/PgXAC2vi044J