patc (01/28/83)
What's going on here? Several articles have come through recently that seem to have been munged over. In particular sombody is eating $ (dollar signs) plus the following character. It is inter- esting to see stiff about It cost 0,000 plus 0,000 year giving 0,000 but I really wander what the figues were. OK whos system is hungry for $$ money. Just to see if you are upstream or down from the problem here is a dollar figure. $100 = (100 dollars).
geo (01/30/83)
I have noticed missing dollar signs too, but only in the subject lines. I think that it is the result of someone invoking inews in the following way: inews -n net.games.trivia -t "$1,000,000 question" The shell of course interprets any metacharacters in the quoted string, swallowing the $1.
geo (02/04/83)
The original article titled "Dollar Signs" (bronze.445) asked whether the missing dollar signs in articles were the result of a bug in news or uucp. In my original response (watarts.1652) I contended that they were all the result of human error, as all the missing dollar signs I had seen were in the Title: lines of articles, where if the poster had incorrectly escaped the $[0-9] it would have been swallowed by the shell. I have received a couple of responses from people contending that dollar signs disappear from the body of articles too. On of my respondents cited tekchips.172 as an example. Yes, this article does have some places where dollar signs are obviously missing. However this article has also been formatted. Nroff would also try to interpret $[0-9]. I think I will still contend that articles with missing dollar signs are the result of human errors. I would be interested in hearing about any counter-examples....