[TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view

[Clem Cole]

Noel.  Pls check the TUHS archives and I think you will see sed does yet
exist in 6th edition when Joy wrote head in 1977.  Certainly not yet at
UCB.

On Sun, Jul 4, 2021 at 9:34 PM Noel Hunt <noel.hunt at gmail.com> wrote:

> > But note that when wnj wrote head(1), Joy followed the
> > famous `Unix Philosophy' of  doing one (small) job
> > well.   Which means he did not add a feature *i.e.*
> > abusing, an old program, like cat(1), and add some new
> > switch to it that that told the program stop outputting
> > after n lines.  Instead Joy wrote a simple new tool.
>
> He didn't need to abuse any existing program by adding new
> flags or the like; unless I am mistaken, `sed Nq', for some
> number `N', does exactly what `head -N' would do on a single
> file, obviating the very need for head(1).
>
>> --
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
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