[TUHS] On computerese

[Dave Horsfall]

[ Of "dd -if" ]

On Mon, 16 Sep 2024, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:

> I think it was only Plan 9. The change was motivated by the rc shell, 
> which treated x=y anywhere on the command line (not just at the 
> beginning of a command) as a variable assignment.

That is plain broken, but I can see how it could/would work; something 
like "A=B blah A=C blah"?

> (For a while I used Byron's rc. I was used to typing
> 
> 	echo ===============
> 
> to generate separator lines. rc threw a syntax error at me. :-)

Which is why I've always quoted anything not strictly alphanumeric; you 
never know what the current shell will do (especially if it's CSH[*]).

[*]
At a client's office I espied a book on CSH, and said something like "If 
there's any book that deserves to be burned, it's one on CSH programming"; 
pretty much everyone laughed :-)

-- Dave