[TUHS] Whence did "XXX" come about?

[Warner Losh]

I'll also add that this seemed foreign when I had patches that had XXX in
them I submitted to the linux folks in the early 90s. It was second nature
in the BSD side of things. But I don't know if that's a Berkeley thing or a
Bell Labs thing Berkeley picked up...

Warner

On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 12:11 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

> The earliest my quick grep could find was 4.0BSD. I didn't find it in this
> sense in pwb, but it was a quick grep...
>
> xxx is used extensively in prior versions, but there it's meaning is
> 'placeholder' or 'don't care'. Mostly for /tmp/XXXX files, but also for
> things like Jxxx handles all the jump commands or dates of the form 24 Feb
> XXXX or stuff like that.
>
> Warner
>
> On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 11:34 AM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
>> For yonks I've been seeing "XXX" as a flag to mean "needs more work" or
>> "look at this carefully, just in case" etc, and I use it myself.
>>
>> Whence did it come about?  I think I saw it as early as PWB, but can't be
>> sure.
>>
>> -- Dave, wondering how many nanny-filters he triggered with "XXX"
>>
>
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