Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Michael Siegel

    > there's no need to write out "less" every time. You can just alias that
    > to "pg" without causing any harm and save two letters, which is an
    > improvement for a task that is performed manually rather often.
  
It always surpised me that there wasn't more of this - abbreviating the names
of the most-used commands, to minimize typing - or more specifically,
run-length encoding them based on how frequently they were used, with the
most-used ones given the shortest names.

The MIT-DSSR PWB1 system had a pager called just 'p' (source here:

    http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s2/p.c

if anyone wants to see it; the man page is dated Apr/77); and 'ls' was tweaked
to recognize the command name 'l' as an alias for 'ls -ls'.

Of course, aliases didn't exist in the shell back then, which was why the
command had to be coded to recognize the short form, and act differently.
(And /bin/l was linked to /bin/ls.)

'l' and 'p' are _still_ aliased in my shell,to this day!


    > I hope it's okay that I chose to reply just to the list address and take
    > all the other addresses out.

'That's not a bug, that's a feature!'

I always delete other addresses when replying to a list, unless I think someone
might not be subscribed to that list.

      Noel

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Kurt H Maier]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 07:33:31AM +1000, Rob Pike wrote:
> There is only one correct way.
> 
> 
> ... .bashrc
> 

I have a doubt.

khm

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Rob Pike]

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There is only one correct way.


% grep PAGER .bashrc

export PAGER='col -b'

%


-rob



On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 2:26 AM Derek Fawcus <
dfawcus+lists-tuhs@employees.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 05:35:28PM -0700, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> >
> > In a related vein what annoys me are so-called modern programs like
> > "git", "hg", and others which default to always piping their output
> > through $PAGER, along with such things as colour decorations enabled,
> > but when you tack on "|$PAGER" to their command-line then they turn off
> > the decorations!  They cause me to have to undo decades of finger
> > memory.
>
> Well, for further fun, one could always export GIT_PAGER=cat,
> then git will not use a pager for those commands, recognising that
> 'cat' is a no-op in such cases.  :-)
>
> DF
>

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Derek Fawcus]

On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 05:35:28PM -0700, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> 
> In a related vein what annoys me are so-called modern programs like
> "git", "hg", and others which default to always piping their output
> through $PAGER, along with such things as colour decorations enabled,
> but when you tack on "|$PAGER" to their command-line then they turn off
> the decorations!  They cause me to have to undo decades of finger
> memory.

Well, for further fun, one could always export GIT_PAGER=cat,
then git will not use a pager for those commands, recognising that
'cat' is a no-op in such cases.  :-)

DF

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Greg A. Woods]

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At Sun, 21 Jun 2020 20:49:31 +0200, Michael Siegel <msi@malbolge.net> wrote:
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager
>
> In fact, my question about the origin and life of pg(1) arose while
> writing a yet unfinished addendum to a blog article that details my
> failed attempt to hack together a solution for auto-paged ls(1).[1]
>
> The conclusion there was: Those attempts (you can find them in quite a
> few places throughout the Web) are futile, just pipe to a pager when you
> need it.

Indeed!  Just pipe to a pager when you need to!

There's also the benefit use of a modern "terminal" gives, e.g. Xterm:

(a) on a modern screen it can display a whole lot more than an
    old-fashioned 24x80 terminal;

(b) it offers a scroll-back buffer so if you get somewhat more output
    than expected you can just scroll back a bit to scan through it all.

Such features further reduce the need for any pager.

In a related vein what annoys me are so-called modern programs like
"git", "hg", and others which default to always piping their output
through $PAGER, along with such things as colour decorations enabled,
but when you tack on "|$PAGER" to their command-line then they turn off
the decorations!  They cause me to have to undo decades of finger
memory.

> However, there's no need to write out "less" every time. You can just
> alias that to "pg" without causing any harm and save two letters, which
> is an improvement for a task that is performed manually rather often.

I've used an alias and/or shell function called "ds" (for display) since
approximately forever, typically to invoke whatever I've set $PAGER to,
at least in more recent times.

Others I've know have called it just "p", and indeed there's been a
pager called just "p" in Research Unix since the Eighth Edition (and in
8th Edition the manual page suggests is also known as "more" and by 10th
Edition the manual adds "pg" too, though it's not installed directly
with those aliases by the makefile).

I've stuck with "ds", partly for finger memory, and also partly because
it is for the most part unique (at least in all environments I've
typically used).  That gives me the option of using a pager called "pg"
directly should I want to, while getting my "default" favourite pager
(from those available on a given system) when I use "ds".

--
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods@acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods@avoncote.ca>

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Michael Siegel]

Am 15.06.20 um 16:56 schrieb Clem Cole:

> Funny, when Steve Zimmerman was at Masscomp, one of the things he did
> was put the ITS style 'more' into the TTY driver (along with Tenex
> style ^T), both of which  I loved having until I went to Stellar --
> it was always on my list of things that would be cool.   But we had
> window managers by then, and we never thought adding more into the
> TTY driver it was worth it.   The truth is, either put it in the
> driver as a base feature so everything that runs gets support for it
> without having to remember to add it to the pipeline, or solves the
> problem more globally like a window manager does. I can see good
> arguments to both schemes -- that later is a tad more elegant and see
> seems simpler / less complex (Doug's rules).  In fact, we have lived
> with that style of solution for years, but ... I still need to use
> more(1) even with a window manager/terminal emulator that allows me
> to scroll 'forever' [I don't need many of the features of less(1)],
> but something like p/pg/more does seem to be desirable.

From my perspective as a user, I would love to see paging built in.
Having to use pagers to view terminal output conveniently is, in my
opinion, a major nuisance.

In fact, my question about the origin and life of pg(1) arose while
writing a yet unfinished addendum to a blog article that details my
failed attempt to hack together a solution for auto-paged ls(1).[1]

The conclusion there was: Those attempts (you can find them in quite a
few places throughout the Web) are futile, just pipe to a pager when you
need it.

However, there's no need to write out "less" every time. You can just
alias that to "pg" without causing any harm and save two letters, which
is an improvement for a task that is performed manually rather often.


Michael

[1] https://www.msiism.org/blog/2019/07/17/no_fun_with_auto-paged_ls.html


PS: I hope it's okay that I chose to reply just to the list address and
take all the other addresses out. If not, please let me know.

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Michael Siegel]

Hello everyone,

now that I'm subscribed to this list as well, first let me say thank you
for all the info on pg(1) you've provided. I really wasn't expecting
that much.

The only thing I'm able to add here is that, shortly after I had sent my
question to Warren, I discovered that the Rationale section in the POSIX
description of more(1) explicitly says:

  The more utility, available in BSD and BSD-derived systems, was chosen
  as the prototype for the POSIX file display program since it is more
  widely available than either the public-domain program less or than
  pg, a pager provided in System V.[1]

This also strongly suggests that pg(1) never made it into POSIX. Well,
if I'm not mistaken, that quote actually says that pg(1) didn't make it
into POSIX.


Michael


[1]
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/more.html#tag_20_81_18

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Lars Brinkhoff]

> Clem Cole wrote:
>> I think Eric arrived later than Dan (maybe a year later), but was also
>> ex-MIT, and he too had used/seen --MORE-- on ITS as Dan had. But I was
>> under the impression Eric started over.
> That's not what Dan writes (see below), but I'll ask him to confirm his
> version.

He responded and asked me to post his reply to the mailing list:

   As described in https://danhalbert.org/more.html, I wrote the
   original version of more. It was only a page or two or code, and was
   meant to replace the dysfunctional cr3. It went into raw mode so it
   could read a space as a "next page" character, but otherwise didn't
   care about what kind of terminal it was on. (The ADM-3's (not 3A's)
   were barely a terminal.)

   Clem Cole's timeline is a bit off. Eric Shienbrood, Geoff Peck, and I
   all arrived at Berkeley at the same time in fall 1978 as CS grad
   students, and became friends (along with some other folks).

   After I wrote the first version, I did not have time to continue to
   working on it, so Eric picked it up and added many more features. My
   contribution is that I had the original idea (to replace cr3) and
   coined the name, and made the very first version. I am grateful to
   Eric, Geoff, and others taking it much further with many more
   features.

   I am still in touch with Eric, and will ask him to see what he has to
   say. We are both still alive so I appreciate Lars getting in touch
   with me to verify.

   I also wrote a hack less as a joke, which was more except that it
   scrolled up the screen rather than down . I think it was Bill Joy who
   then wrote another less that paged from the end of the file (and also
   scrolled up the screen).

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Clem Cole]

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No, that the same Steve Zimmerman was (is) and MIT type (he is also the
'Zimmerman' of EMACS fame.

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 11:04 AM Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:

> Funny, when Steve Zimmerman was at Masscomp, one of the things he did was
>> put the ITS style 'more' into the TTY driver (along with Tenex style ^T)
>>
>
> Did Steve go to UofMD?  They were big on those things.  (I seem to recall
> a patch adding it to Pyramid)
>

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Clem Cole wrote:
> I think Eric arrived later than Dan (maybe a year later), but was also
> ex-MIT, and he too had used/seen --MORE-- on ITS as Dan had. But I was
> under the impression Eric started over.

That's not what Dan writes (see below), but I'll ask him to confirm his
version.


Clem Cole wrote:
> Mary Ann Horton wrote:
>> I do have a vague recollection of a program called cr3 intended to
>> mimic the tty driver thing. Perhaps that was Dan's version.
>
> You know, indeed it might have been called cr3 originally.

Dan's full account is on his web site here:

https://danhalbert.org/more.html

He writes he was not happy with cr3 and wrote more to replace it.

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Richard Salz]

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>
> Funny, when Steve Zimmerman was at Masscomp, one of the things he did was
> put the ITS style 'more' into the TTY driver (along with Tenex style ^T)
>

Did Steve go to UofMD?  They were big on those things.  (I seem to recall a
patch adding it to Pyramid)

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 10:15 AM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:

> Hmm. Clem has a far richer recollection than I do. I don't recall Dan's
> version, but I defer to Clem.
>
> I do have a vague recollection of a program called cr3 intended to mimic
> the tty driver thing. Perhaps that was Dan's version.
>
You know, indeed it might have been called cr3 originally.   We used it for
such a short time.  I just remember we had something that was an
alternative to pg(1), there was something different about it, maybe it
better used the try driver's canonical modes, I really don't remember.  I
do remember when the TERMCAP based more(1) showed up, we all switched to it
overnight.

Funny, when Steve Zimmerman was at Masscomp, one of the things he did was
put the ITS style 'more' into the TTY driver (along with Tenex style ^T),
both of which  I loved having until I went to Stellar -- it was always on
my list of things that would be cool.   But we had window managers by then,
and we never thought adding more into the TTY driver it was worth it.   The
truth is, either put it in the driver as a base feature so everything that
runs gets support for it without having to remember to add it to the
pipeline, or solves the problem more globally like a window manager does.
 I can see good arguments to both schemes -- that later is a tad more
elegant and see seems simpler / less complex (Doug's rules).  In fact, we
have lived with that style of solution for years, but ... I still need to
use more(1) even with a window manager/terminal emulator that allows me to
scroll 'forever' [I don't need many of the features of less(1)], but
something like p/pg/more does seem to be desirable.

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Mary Ann Horton]

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Hmm. Clem has a far richer recollection than I do. I don't recall Dan's 
version, but I defer to Clem.

I do have a vague recollection of a program called cr3 intended to mimic 
the tty driver thing. Perhaps that was Dan's version.

I note that my 4.1BSD manual more(1) says the author is "Eric 
Shienbrood, minor revisions by John Foderaro and Geoffrey Peck."

On 6/15/20 6:56 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>     Wikipedia says "more" was written by Daniel Halbert and expanded
>     by EricShienbrood and Geoff Peck.
>
> I also believe that is partially true and Mary Ann is actually correct 
> in the provenance.
>
> I think Eric arrived later than Dan (maybe a year later), but was also 
> ex-MIT, and he too had used/seen --MORE-- on ITS as Dan had.  But I 
> was under the impression Eric started over. Then a few years after 
> Eric, Geoff worked with Eric's sources to add a few features. As for 
> starting over/hacking on the program from Dan's original code base, 
> it's hard to call that one, as  I recall that Dan's version was not 
> much more than a hack on to cat(1). i.e. the original version was 
> pretty simple, and I don't remember that it 'knew' about the type of 
> terminal being used, get info from TERMCAP /et al/.

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Clem Cole]

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First, as for pg(1) itself, I thought it came from one of the non-Research
labs, like Holmdel or Indian Hill.   I certainly remember using it on AT&T
based system before System V arrived on the scene.   It's possible, tjk had
it from USG, but I think it's more likely I saw it from someone like Phil
Karn.  We also had pg(1) at Tek until I was introduced to more(1) probably
originally from Jim Kleckner and the CAD folks [which worked better and
pg(1) -- which means I probably brought pg(1) to Tek, unless it came from
one the Purdue folks like Ward, I don't remember].     I also know pg(1)
was available for PWB 3.0 at some point, as we had it at Masscomp before we
got System V and we had it the AT&T 'universe' but I don't remember the
provenance of that code (again I could have brought it with me, but I think
it came to Masscomp via MIT).   That said, Warren's PWB 3.0/SYS III source
tree does not show binary or source, which makes the thought that it was
AT&T based, but originated at a lab other than Summit or MH.

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 1:41 AM Lars Brinkhoff <lars@nocrew.org> wrote:

> Daniel Halbert wrote to comp.society.folklore in 1994:
>   "I was a first-year graduate student at UC Berkeley in 1978. I had
>   been an undergraduate at MIT, and had used the ITS timesharing systems
>   there, which ran on PDP-10's. ITS put a "--MORE--" at the bottom of
>   the screen when one typed out files [..]
>
I believe that to be true.

Wikipedia says "more" was written by Daniel Halbert and expanded by
Eric Shienbrood
> and Geoff Peck.
>
I also believe that is partially true and Mary Ann is actually correct in
the provenance.

I think Eric arrived later than Dan (maybe a year later), but was also
ex-MIT, and he too had used/seen --MORE-- on ITS as Dan had.  But I was
under the impression Eric started over.  Then a few years after Eric, Geoff
worked with Eric's sources to add a few features.  As for starting
over/hacking on the program from Dan's original code base, it's hard to
call that one, as  I recall that Dan's version was not much more than a
hack on to cat(1). i.e. the original version was pretty simple, and I don't
remember that it 'knew' about the type of terminal being used, get info
from TERMCAP *et al*.  [My intro to Dan's version was at Tek, BTW but was
quickly replaced with Eric's TERMCAP version which I think I got from Mary
Ann, but might have also been via the CAD connection - we in TekLabs had
written all of the TERMCAP support for the Tek 4025 and family and I was
working to get it all back into the UCB database, so we got a bunch of
early PDP-11 based TERMCAP/curses code to help debug things since the 4025
supported some interesting modes].

To be fair, ITS and Dan certainly should get credit for introducing the
idea of the terminal pager to UCB, but it really was Eric that created the
more(1) program framework that took off and eventually did begat less(1),
pg(1), p(1) and others.    As for less(1) itself, the Gnu folks seem to
have started with Geoff's version (which I think is the version in 4.2 BSD
if you look at SCCS delta in Kurt's disks), with the biggest addition was
for the user to be able to go backward and look at some of the text that
had already scrolled off the page.   But as pointed out elsewhere, after
the Gnu folks had peed all over it; as Doug says, (and I suspect most of us
agree) it really became a sort of lesson in featuritis.


But as discussed on many things in the historical computer world,
more/less/pg/p often comes back to taste ->  more(1) and p(1) were much
more directed a doing one job well.   As Larry says, there are features of
less(1) which can be handy depending on your environment -- if you don't
have a window manager/BLIT or today's user interfaces with unlimited
scrolling (*i.e. *still on an ADM3A or VT-100), then many of the features
of less(1) probably are considered a nice to have, you got used to them and
it became your standard [burned in the ROMs in your fingers like csh(1) and
vi(1) into my own].  But as Rob and Doug have pointed out, p(1) is more
than sufficient and the 'extras' that programs like less(1) in a modern and
clean environment start having doubtful long term value.   Certainly, the
'cost' in complexity and 'code bloat' seems like a poor trade-off.  But the
assumption to me is that the desire for those type of features are
fulfilled with different tools in the current world, but if you grew up
with using them (say like Larry) I can see the value.

Clem

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Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Mary Ann Horton wrote:
> Eric Shienbrood at Berkeley wrote "more" around 1979, and it was the
> standard BSD pager. It was inspired by the --More-- option in the ITS
> terminal driver at MIT.

Daniel Halbert wrote to comp.society.folklore in 1994:

  "I was a first-year graduate student at UC Berkeley in 1978. I had
  been an undergraduate at MIT, and had used the ITS timesharing systems
  there, which ran on PDP-10's. ITS put a "--MORE--" at the bottom of
  the screen when one typed out files [..]

  So I wrote a simple "cr3"-like program, but had it print "--More--"
  instead of ringing the bell. I had it accept space instead of carriage
  return to continue, because that was what I was used to from ITS."

Wikipedia says "more" was written by Daniel Halbert and expanded by Eric
Shienbrood and Geoff Peck.

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Nemo Nusquam]

For what it's worth, the OpenSolaris pg.c 
(https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenSolaris_b135/cmd/pg/pg.c) 
contains the following:

/*
  * Copyright 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
  * Use is subject to license terms.
  */

/*    Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T    */
/*      All Rights Reserved      */

N.

On 06/14/20 19:37, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
> Eric Shienbrood at Berkeley wrote "more" around 1979, and it was the 
> standard BSD pager. It was inspired by the --More-- option in the ITS 
> terminal driver at MIT.
>
> "pg" did not come from Berkeley. My recollection is that it came from 
> AT&T in response to requests to include "more", which was in exptools 
> at Bell Labs but not in any standard AT&T system. "pg" is not in my 
> UNIX 5.0 manual, but it's in my SVID with the comment "New in System V 
> Release 2".
>
> UNIX 5.0 was the AT&T internal pre-release of System V.  SVID was the 
> System V Interface Definition from AT&T.
>
>     Mary Ann
>
> On 6/14/20 3:52 PM, Warren Toomey wrote:
>> All, I just received this e-mail from a non-TUHS list member. If you 
>> have
>> an answer for Michael, could you reply to him and pop a cc here as well?
>>
>> Thanks, Warren
>>
>> ----- Forwarded message from Michael Siegel <msi@malbolge.net> -----
>>
>> Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:37:59 +0200
>> From: Michael Siegel <msi@malbolge.net>
>> To: wkt@tuhs.org
>> Subject: Origins and life of the pg pager
>>
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I'm trying to find out where the pg pager originated.
>>
>> The research I've done so far vaguely suggests it came with one of the
>> System V versions, though Internet claims it to be “the name of the
>> historical utility on BSD UNIX systems” occasionally.[1]
>>
>> I think System V because the source code of pg.c in the util-linux
>> package says that this utility is “a clone of the System V CRT paging
>> utility.”[2]
>>
>> I'd also like to find out when pg was discarded and if it ever made it
>> into POSIX before that. Linux still has pg to the very day, but none of
>> the current major BSDs (Free/Net/Open) offer it. POSIX 2001, 2004
>> Edition lists it as an excluded utility.[3] I've not been able to get
>> the text of any prior POSIX documents. It seems they aren't freely
>> available.
>>
>> Any ideas on how to proceed?
>>
>>
>> Best
>> Michael
>>
>>
>> [1] This one's from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pg_(Unix)),
>>      but I've also found other sites stating the same.
>>
>> [2]
>> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/tree/text-utils/pg.c 
>>
>>
>> [3] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696899/xrat/xcu_chap04.html
>>
>> ----- End forwarded message -----

Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Mary Ann Horton]

Eric Shienbrood at Berkeley wrote "more" around 1979, and it was the 
standard BSD pager. It was inspired by the --More-- option in the ITS 
terminal driver at MIT.

"pg" did not come from Berkeley. My recollection is that it came from 
AT&T in response to requests to include "more", which was in exptools at 
Bell Labs but not in any standard AT&T system. "pg" is not in my UNIX 
5.0 manual, but it's in my SVID with the comment "New in System V 
Release 2".

UNIX 5.0 was the AT&T internal pre-release of System V.  SVID was the 
System V Interface Definition from AT&T.

     Mary Ann

On 6/14/20 3:52 PM, Warren Toomey wrote:
> All, I just received this e-mail from a non-TUHS list member. If you have
> an answer for Michael, could you reply to him and pop a cc here as well?
>
> Thanks, Warren
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Michael Siegel <msi@malbolge.net> -----
>
> Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:37:59 +0200
> From: Michael Siegel <msi@malbolge.net>
> To: wkt@tuhs.org
> Subject: Origins and life of the pg pager
>
> Hi there,
>
> I'm trying to find out where the pg pager originated.
>
> The research I've done so far vaguely suggests it came with one of the
> System V versions, though Internet claims it to be “the name of the
> historical utility on BSD UNIX systems” occasionally.[1]
>
> I think System V because the source code of pg.c in the util-linux
> package says that this utility is “a clone of the System V CRT paging
> utility.”[2]
>
> I'd also like to find out when pg was discarded and if it ever made it
> into POSIX before that. Linux still has pg to the very day, but none of
> the current major BSDs (Free/Net/Open) offer it. POSIX 2001, 2004
> Edition lists it as an excluded utility.[3] I've not been able to get
> the text of any prior POSIX documents. It seems they aren't freely
> available.
>
> Any ideas on how to proceed?
>
>
> Best
> Michael
>
>
> [1] This one's from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pg_(Unix)),
>      but I've also found other sites stating the same.
>
> [2]
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/tree/text-utils/pg.c
>
> [3] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696899/xrat/xcu_chap04.html
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----

[TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Warren Toomey]

All, I just received this e-mail from a non-TUHS list member. If you have
an answer for Michael, could you reply to him and pop a cc here as well?

Thanks, Warren

----- Forwarded message from Michael Siegel <msi@malbolge.net> -----

Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:37:59 +0200
From: Michael Siegel <msi@malbolge.net>
To: wkt@tuhs.org
Subject: Origins and life of the pg pager

Hi there,

I'm trying to find out where the pg pager originated.

The research I've done so far vaguely suggests it came with one of the
System V versions, though Internet claims it to be “the name of the
historical utility on BSD UNIX systems” occasionally.[1]

I think System V because the source code of pg.c in the util-linux
package says that this utility is “a clone of the System V CRT paging
utility.”[2]

I'd also like to find out when pg was discarded and if it ever made it
into POSIX before that. Linux still has pg to the very day, but none of
the current major BSDs (Free/Net/Open) offer it. POSIX 2001, 2004
Edition lists it as an excluded utility.[3] I've not been able to get
the text of any prior POSIX documents. It seems they aren't freely
available.

Any ideas on how to proceed?


Best
Michael


[1] This one's from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pg_(Unix)),
    but I've also found other sites stating the same.

[2]
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/tree/text-utils/pg.c

[3] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696899/xrat/xcu_chap04.html

----- End forwarded message -----