[TUHS] Line Numbers Before SysIII nl? BSD num?

Douglas McIlroy douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu
Sun Jul 24 12:42:02 AEST 2022


I've not seen an earlier post of mine on this topic; apologies if this
is a duplicate. Roff was probably the earliest way to get a
line-numbered file listing. Of course it took a bit of chicanery to
apply it to a roff input file, but even that was not a big shell
script.

As has often been told, Joe Ossanna used to promise of line numbers
(required by USPTO) to attract the Bell Labs patent department as the
first Unix "customer".

Doug


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