From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2017 17:28:45 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] Dash options In-Reply-To: <201711280551.vAS5pDZt014974@darkstar.fourwinds.com> References: <201711280551.vAS5pDZt014974@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Message-ID: <20171128062845.GB5277@eureka.lemis.com> On Monday, 27 November 2017 at 21:51:13 -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote: > Does anybody know the history of dash options? Were they > a UNIX thing or did UNIX borrow them from something earlier? If you mean specificall the dash, I can't help much. But there were similar ideas elsewhere. UNIVAC EXEC-8 (for the 1108, late 1960s) had options that followed the command with a comma, like: @RUN,G GOPU,STANDARD,STANDARD @ADD,PL ASGDMS . ASSIGNIERT DATENBASIS @ASG,A PF. . PF IST PROGRAMM-FILE MIT GOPU @XQT PF.GOPU The letters after the comma were option letters, conveniently packed into a machine word so that they didn't require parsing. OMEGA on the Univac 494 had something similar, but delimited by a space rather than a comma, reminiscent of earlier tar syntax. I don't know any other systems, but since UNIVAC and Unix aren't closely related, I'd guess that there were similar ideas elsewhere too. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: