<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Ron</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">I never understood why sendmail needed it. [Actually I never really understand sendmail's need but that's another discussion and discussion I've had with Ertc over the years]. But shell escape were pretty typical, until Kulp's ^Z job control stuff and/or real window managers - it would have sucked not to have had them.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Off the top of my head:</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><ul><li>any editor (text or graphical) </li><li>things that controlled the screen like more(1) would have wanted to support something like this</li><li>programs that produced graphical output -- from *roff/tex and the like, to many/most of the CAD programs, or even Ghostscript I think. You might want to dump out and suck back in something processed from another program, and the 'pipeline' was not always the easy/right way to do that. Classic example of calling on the PS/EPS tools from inside of troff. This is why tools like xdvi and the like supported it.</li><li>long-running games where you did not want to lose your session</li><li>many things that supported remote job entry/execution - which was really common in the old days [hence UUCP, the PWB RJE tools, rsh and the like]. IICR there was a couple of versions of telnet/supdup that could do it.</li></ul><div>Clem</div></div><div hspace="streak-pt-mark" style="max-height:1px"><img alt="" style="width:0px;max-height:0px;overflow:hidden" src="https://mailfoogae.appspot.com/t?sender=aY2xlbWNAY2NjLmNvbQ%3D%3D&type=zerocontent&guid=e7d9156b-0f50-494f-a998-f610f3d710aa"><font color="#ffffff" size="1">ᐧ</font></div></div><div hspace="streak-pt-mark" style="max-height:1px"><img alt="" style="width:0px;max-height:0px;overflow:hidden" src="https://mailfoogae.appspot.com/t?sender=aY2xlbWNAY2NjLmNvbQ%3D%3D&type=zerocontent&guid=1401532f-f674-447c-b671-ddeadd0d4b44"><font color="#ffffff" size="1">ᐧ</font></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Aug 1, 2023 at 1:48 AM ron minnich <<a href="mailto:rminnich@gmail.com" target="_blank">rminnich@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">I got to wondering, based on the sendmail discussions, how many shell<br>
escapes have appeared over the years?<br>
<br>
uucp<br>
sendmail<br>
xdvi : "The "allowShell" option enables the shell escape in PostScript specials"<br>
<br>
There must be a lot of them, however.<br>
</blockquote></div>