mlip@NADC.ARPA (09/07/84)
[ What's up, Doc?]
I have found an interesting feature with Berkeley's 4.1 Bourne shell.
Valid command arguments that begin with '^' (the caret character)
evince strange behavior. The output of such commands are first sent
to limbo, and then the shell strips the '^' from the argument and tries
to execute the argument.
Example:
ls ^date
gives the date and nothing more.
Also:
date ^pwd
shows the current directory and nothing more.
Try:
fred ^any_valid_command
The shell behaves correctly when the caret is protected with
quotes. Switching tty drivers does not solve the problem.
Is the caret an undocumented metacharacter or is this a side
effect of Berkeley's "history" feature in the cshell?
Michael Lipczynski
mlip@nadcdaven@LLL-CRG.ARPA (09/07/84)
From: Dave Nelson <daven@LLL-CRG.ARPA> As I recall, the caret is an old, abandoned equivalent to the pipe character |. Thus, to quote your message: Example: ls ^date gives the date and nothing more. Also: date ^pwd shows the current directory and nothing more. I thought this was documented somewhere (maybe in old V7 documentation?), but a quick glance in the obvious places revealed nothing. Oh well.... Dave Nelson (daven@lll-crg) "But you were expected to KNOW that!"
smh@SRI-PRISM.ARPA (09/07/84)
From: "Scott M. Hinnrichs" <smh@SRI-PRISM.ARPA> The Bourne shell treats ^ as a | (pipe). It is useful to know this if you terminal does not have the | char. Scott
gwyn@BRL-VLD.ARPA (09/07/84)
From: Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn@BRL-VLD.ARPA> The Bourne shell accepts ^ as a synonym for |. This is for "historical reasons"; you should not deliberately start using ^ instead of |.