From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <3b8ca08e65a47af482e25d1b764043bd@plan9.bell-labs.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2006 20:32:21 -0500
From: dmr@plan9.bell-labs.com
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: echo -n
In-Reply-To: <13426df10611201832m7ce46730pf61df2e78d544e14@mail.gmail.com>
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  > This whole discussion has been coming up for years. I can't remember
  > the first time I saw it but it was definitely over a quarter century
  > ago.

Indeed.  7th edition and earlier did ignore 0-length
writes.  8th edition streams began to transmit them
over pipes (or networks).  I recall there were two
problems associated with this; one I forget, the other
was that nroff (for some input) would sometimes
generate one for no good reason, so
  nroff thing.ms | whatever
would terminate prematurely.  It was simplest to
fix nroff.

	Dennis