rac@sherpa.UUCP (Roger A. Cornelius) (02/17/89)
From article <556@marob.MASA.COM>, by daveh@marob.MASA.COM (Dave Hammond):
- I rarely (once every few years :-) use /etc/wall, but a recent system
- problem required quickly informing folks. Attempting to run "wall"
- from a root login, running ksh, resulted in:
-
- ksh: who^sed: not found
-
- What? A glance into /etc/wall showed the line:
-
- who^sed -e 's/^[^ ]* *\([^ ]*\).*/cat \/tmp\/'$$' >\/dev\/\1 \&sleep 2/' | sh
-
- [ To those under age 40 -- ^ was a synonym for | on machines which
- didn't include a | keystroke [about 100 years ago :-)]. Therefore, the
- construct "who^sed" was indented to run "who" and pipe it to "sed". ]
[ Dave's personal gripes deleted ]
You'll probably use /usr/bin/diction once for every thirty times you
use /etc/wall, but it has the same problem :-).
Roger rac@sherpa
uunet!sherpa!rac