I've not seen an earlier post of mine on this topic; apologies if this is a duplicate. Roff was probably the earliest way to get a line-numbered file listing. Of course it took a bit of chicanery to apply it to a roff input file, but even that was not a big shell script. As has often been told, Joe Ossanna used to promise of line numbers (required by USPTO) to attract the Bell Labs patent department as the first Unix "customer". Doug