wcs@ho95b.UUCP (59577) (05/24/84)
Dave Sherman posted a quick shell program, containing:
$ for i in *.c
> do
......
> done ^ tee junk
What interested me about this was the use of the ^caret
as a pipe symbol, instead of the | vertical bar. This is kind
of an archaism; the Korn Shell (ksh) has dropped it, although
the System V shell still supports it. Do many people out there
use ^ ? I much prefer the ability to say
grep ^joeuser /etc/passwd
without being told
sh: joeuser: not found
Another note on this is that /bin/sh forks off a process to do
the for loop when directing its output to a pipe; ksh doesn't.
This feature, and builtins for echo and expr considerably speed
up shell script execution in ksh.
Bill
--
The virtual keyboard of:
Bill Stewart
AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ
...!ihnp4!ho95b!wcssdo@u1100a.UUCP (Scott Orshan) (05/25/84)
I always use ^ for a pipe when I'm typing on my keyboard
because it's unshifted, while | is shifted. When I'm using
a keyboard where they're both shifted, I'll use | since it
is in an easier place to type shifted using one hand.
However, no matter what keyboard I'm using, if I'm putting
a pipe into a shell script in a file, even if it is only
temporary, I use | so I know it will always work in the
future.
Scott Orshan
{ihnp4,allegra,pyuxww}!u1100a!sdodave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman) (05/31/84)
Bill Stewart comments on my use of ^ instead of | for the pipe.
That, of course, goes back to v6 (and beyond); I've always used
it. I got started on UNIX using terminals on which ^ was lower-case
and | was upper-case, so ^ was used automatically. Nowadays I use
VT-100's and compatibles, which tend to have ^ as shift-6 and | as
shift-\, but I can't/won't break the ^ habit. Yes, grep "^abc" file
is a case in which it would be useful to have ^ as a non-special character,
but I can live with it.
Dave Sherman
Toronto
--
dave at Toronto (CSnet)
{allegra,cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!utcsrgv!dave