[TUHS] Re: "9 skills our grandkids won't have" - Is this a TUHS topic?

[Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org>]

Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> writes:

> On Fri, Jul 1, 2022 at 10:03 AM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 1 Jul 2022, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
>>
>> > Ctrl-D signifies end of transmission.  Some other O/Ses have used
>> > Ctrl-Z for that purpose, presumably because Z is the final letter
>> > of numerous alphabets.
>>
>> I thought only CP/M and its descendants did that. :o (Of course that
>> includes DOS and Windows)
>>
> Steve - The social disease spread of DOS-11, RT-11, CP/M, and MS/PS-DOS
> used ^Z as an EOF character in their text file format.  The key is that
> they stored a block count, not a byte count in the META.   Thus the last
> byte needs a marker to tell the OS to stop reading. [Early DEC OS's may
> have done that also, but I never looked at their FS formats].
>
> Unix, of course, never made any distinction to the core OS WRT to 'type'
> [other than Regular/Directory/Special]  and Ken stored a character count.
> So there was no need to signal EOF with a markered stored on disk..
>
> A pipe or the shell on the other hand does have a need to signal the end of
> a transaction, and 'End of Transmission,' as Nelson points out, is the
> ASCII character reserved for the same.

But that's a common misconception and not how Ctrl-D works on Unix.
Ctrl-D is part of the terminal discipline and causes an immediate stop
of the current read(2) syscall.  If nothing is in the input buffer,
this causes a zero-length read which is detected as end of file.

You can verify this e.g. by typing "foo<Ctrl-D>" into cat(1).  It will
print "foo", but not exit.  Another Ctrl-D will then quit cat(1) due
to the empty read.

In no case, a ASCII Ctrl-D 0x4 is sent over a pipe or to a shell.
(Over the pty, yes.)

cheers,
-- 
Leah Neukirchen  <leah@vuxu.org>  https://leahneukirchen.org/