v7 Bourne shell does not appear to treat '#' as a comment. I've built termlib and curses for v7 and am now trying to find a small screen editor. I was trying se, but the version I have ships as a shell archive, and it doesn't actually unpack on v7, in part because of the comments. v7 is a target in Jove's Ovmakefile, so that's what I'm trying now. Slow-pasting uuencoded files into the terminal is gross, but efficacious.... Adam On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 5:48 PM Eric Allman wrote: > I contacted Steve --- he is on the list, and says he'll weigh in. > > eric > > > On 2020-01-04 13:06, Jon Steinhart wrote: > > Dave Horsfall writes: > >> On Sat, 4 Jan 2020, markus schnalke wrote: > >> > >>> My question was not about the use cases for ``>file'' but *why* it was > >>> made a simple command. Let me explain: > >>> > >>> One creates an empty file or truncates a file with: > >>> > >>> >file > >>> > >>> why not with: > >>> > >>> :>file > >>> ? > >>> > >>> To me it looks to be the more sensible ... more regular way. > >> > >> The Unix philosophy, perhaps i.e. keep it simple? Why have ":" (an > actual > >> internal Shell command) when "" (the null command) will do the job? > >> > >> I guess only the Bell Labs bods here can answer this. > >> > >> -- Dave > > > > Don't know if Steve Bourne is on this list, but he's been a great source > > of information when I've had questions about why the shell did things the > > way it did. > > > > Jon > > >