[TUHS] Dash options

Greg 'groggy' Lehey grog at lemis.com
Tue Nov 28 16:28:45 AEST 2017


On Monday, 27 November 2017 at 21:51:13 -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Does anybody know the history of dash options?  Were they
> a UNIX thing or did UNIX borrow them from something earlier?

If you mean specificall the dash, I can't help much.  But there were
similar ideas elsewhere.  UNIVAC EXEC-8 (for the 1108, late 1960s) had
options that followed the command with a comma, like:

  @RUN,G GOPU,STANDARD,STANDARD
  @ADD,PL ASGDMS              . ASSIGNIERT DATENBASIS
  @ASG,A PF.                  . PF IST PROGRAMM-FILE MIT GOPU
  @XQT PF.GOPU

The letters after the comma were option letters, conveniently packed
into a machine word so that they didn't require parsing.

OMEGA on the Univac 494 had something similar, but delimited by a
space rather than a comma, reminiscent of earlier tar syntax.

I don't know any other systems, but since UNIVAC and Unix aren't
closely related, I'd guess that there were similar ideas elsewhere
too.

Greg
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