[csw-maintainers] solaris history question

[Peter FELECAN]

Dagobert Michelsen <dam at opencsw.org> writes:

> Am 24.08.2009 um 03:04 schrieb Ben Walton:
>> I've discovered an interesting bit of solaris archaeology today and I
>> wanted to ask those with longer solaris memory why such a thing is
>> still supported.
>>
>> Long before I ever encountered a shell, ^ was the symbol used to
>> separate commands in a pipeline.  It seems that solaris' /bin/sh is
>> still allowing this in some cases.  The following script demonstrates
>> it.

> So, either the authors are not well informed, or Solaris 10 is not a
> modern unix ;-)

Based however on an "old" distribution: BSD and with roots even farther.

It means that a script written in the 70s still works!

> After reading a bit more I learned that this was already in the
> precursor of the Bourne
> Shell, the "Thompson Shell" provided with Unix v4:
>   <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_shell>
> This must have been sometime after 1971, the year I was born 8-)

Nice lesson in humility, isn't it?
-- 
Peter