Lyndon Nerenberg: Do you still consider '^' the shell's inter-command pipe character? ====== No. By the time I first used UNIX, | was well-established as the official pipeline character; ^ was just a quirky synonym. I had the impression somehow that ^ was there just to make life easier on the Model 33 Teletype, which had no | key. Digging into old manuals, ^ and | appear simultaneously, in sh(1) in the Fourth Edition. Pipelines first appeared in 3/e, though with a clumsier syntax (not supported by any current shell I know): where we would now type ls | wc the original syntax was ls > wc > The trailing > was required to tell the shell to make a pipeline of the two commands, rather than to redirect output to a file named wc. One could of course redirect the final command's output to a file as well: ls > wc > filecount Even clumsier: where we would now type ls | pr -h 'Look at all these files!' the 3/e shell expected ls > "pr -h 'Look at all these files!'" > because its parser bound > to only the single following word. The original syntax could be reversed too: wc < ls < The manual implies this was required if the pipeline's ultimate input came from a file. Maybe someone with more energy than I have right now can dig out the source code and see. I was originally going to use an example like who | grep 'r.*' | wc -l but the old-style version would be anachronistic. There was no grep yet in 3/e, and wc took no arguments. I do still have the habit of quoting ^ in command arguments, but that's still necessary on a few current systems; e.g. /bin/sh on Solaris 10. Fortunately, that makes it easier to remember to quote ! as well, something required by the clumsy command-history mechanism some people like but I don't. (I usually turn off history but occasionally it gets turned on by accident anyway.) Norman Wilson Toronto ON