[TUHS] Dash options

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Tue Nov 28 23:19:42 AEST 2017


    > Multics had some kind of `attach' and `detach' of I/O streams, well
    > known to Ossanna, so perhaps dup(2), and a Thompson-shell syntax to go
    > with it meant `>' was earmarked early on.

According to "The Evolution of the Unix Timesharing System", full path names
arrived later than I/O redirection, so by they time they needed a separator,
'>' and '<' were gone. '/' also has the advantage of being a non-shift
character!

	Noel

PS: Re-reading that, I see that early Unix did not have an exec() call (as I
was just discussing); it was done in user mode, with normal read and write
calls.




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