Tony Finch wrote: > Joerg Schilling wrote: > > > > The colon was introduced by AT&T around 1983. > > It's a builtin in the v7 Bourne shell - see SYSNULL in msg.c (which > has the command name table) and in xec.c (which has the implementation) You are missinterpeting things. The colon in line one as a hint to a modified csh to call the Bourne Shell first appeared around 1983. Jörg -- EMail:joerg at schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/'