[TUHS] A Tale of Two Greps (Andrew Hume)

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Friday, January 9th, 2026 at 09:52, Alan Coopersmith via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> On 1/9/26 09:20, andrew--- via TUHS wrote:
> 
> > what struck me in rereading the paper was a refererral to large files beng greater than 10MB.
> > hahahahahaha
> 
> 
> When we were going through all the programs in Solaris to port them to 64-bit
> as the first step in our Y2038-readiness, we decided that we could EOL the
> bfs command, as we no longer needed a special read only version of ed
> for which "Files can be up to 1024K bytes and 32K lines, with up to
> 512 characters, including new-line, per line (255 for 16-bit machines)."
> 
> https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E86824_01/html/E54763/bfs-1.html
> 
> We seem to have inherited it from SVR4, and I see a copy in the SVR3 source
> tree - I'm not sure how far back before that it was created.
> 
> --
> -Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
> Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris

Earliest bfs(1) I can find is in PWB: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=PWB1/usr/man/man1/bfs.1

This cemented it in the PWB-to-commercial line from 1977 on.  For the record, bfs(1) is not in USG PG-II or PG-III so is likely squarely from PWB.

- Matt G.