[TUHS] basic tools / Universal Unix

Doug McIlroy doug at cs.dartmouth.edu
Thu Oct 19 09:03:05 AEST 2017


>       sed *n l pathname
>
>   The latter also has the advantage that its output is

>   unambiguous, whereas the output of historical cat *etv is not.
>
> But mind you, in preparation of this email i found a bug in
> Busybox sed(1) which simply echoes nothing for the above.

I assume that * is a typo for - . If so, sed did just what
-n tells it to--no printing except as called for by p or P.

And speaking of sed anticipating other tools, the inclusion
of "head" in v7 as a complement to "tail" was a close call
because head is subsumed by sed q.

Doug



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