[TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Warren Toomey]

All, I just received this e-mail from a non-TUHS list member. If you have
an answer for Michael, could you reply to him and pop a cc here as well?

Thanks, Warren

----- Forwarded message from Michael Siegel <msi at malbolge.net> -----

Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:37:59 +0200
From: Michael Siegel <msi at malbolge.net>
To: wkt at tuhs.org
Subject: Origins and life of the pg pager

Hi there,

I'm trying to find out where the pg pager originated.

The research I've done so far vaguely suggests it came with one of the
System V versions, though Internet claims it to be “the name of the
historical utility on BSD UNIX systems” occasionally.[1]

I think System V because the source code of pg.c in the util-linux
package says that this utility is “a clone of the System V CRT paging
utility.”[2]

I'd also like to find out when pg was discarded and if it ever made it
into POSIX before that. Linux still has pg to the very day, but none of
the current major BSDs (Free/Net/Open) offer it. POSIX 2001, 2004
Edition lists it as an excluded utility.[3] I've not been able to get
the text of any prior POSIX documents. It seems they aren't freely
available.

Any ideas on how to proceed?


Best
Michael


[1] This one's from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pg_(Unix)),
    but I've also found other sites stating the same.

[2]
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/tree/text-utils/pg.c

[3] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696899/xrat/xcu_chap04.html

----- End forwarded message -----