rrh@uw-june.UUCP (Robert R. Henry) (07/08/87)
A friend forwarded me the following message: > Article 1163 of Newsgroup comp.emacs reads: > Subject: CCA Emacs bogosity (random environment variable) > > I just noticed an interesting bogosity with CCA emacs (version > 162.43z). For some reason that I cannot fathom, the authors decided to > invent an environment variable called "henry" and set it equal to "1". I > don't think I would be in serious violation of my non-disclosure agreement > if I revealed that the following source line exists, in e_init.c: > ... I'm the Robert Henry that is implicitly referenced in this "bogosity". Here's the story: Way back when (about 1979), when Kurt Shoens and I were graduate students at Berkeley, Kurt was working on a new mail program, which evolved into Berkeley mail, /usr/ucb/mail. By default, mail ignores lines beginning with the escape character when its input is coming from stdin. I didn't like this, since I wanted to do things like: (echo ~s File $file; cat $file) | Mail luser and have the subject line (escape ~s) get set with the name of the file. Well, Kurt didn't think this was a good idea, but to please me, he put in the option 'henry', which, for some reason of pervisity, blindness and sheer humor, found its way into various distributions. This option apparently is no longer there by that name; at least on UltrixT2.0, strings -a /usr/ucb/mail | grep henry turns up nothing of interest. Here I'm still a youngish man, and already contributing to the "Annals of Computing"...! Robert R. Henry Computer Science Department, FR-35 University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 206 545 1934