I'll accept Rob's theory. Instead of taking the time to go through the
alphabet soup of options to nl and pr and ls, learning a tool like awk or
perl or python makes implementing most of what these commands do (or what
you wish they could do) a one-finger exercise. -- jpl

On Fri, May 10, 2024 at 6:09 AM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:

> Didn't recognize the command, looked it up. Sigh.
>
>   pr -tn <file>
>
> seems sufficient for me, but then that raises the question of your
> question.
>
> I've been developing a theory about how the existence of something leads
> to things being added to it that you didn't need at all and only thought of
> when the original thing was created. Bloat by example, if you will. I
> suspect it will not be a popular theory, however accurately it may describe
> the technological world.
>
> -rob
>
>
> On Fri, May 10, 2024 at 4:16 PM David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> wrote:
>
>> nl(1) uses the notable character sequences “\:\:\:”, “\:\:”, and “\:” to
>> delimit header, body, and trailer sections within its input.
>>
>> I wondered if anyone was able to shed light on the reason those were
>> adopted as the defaults?
>>
>> I would have expected perhaps something compatible with *roff (like, .\”
>> something).
>>
>> FreeBSD claims nl first appeared in System III (although it previously
>> claimed SVR2), but I haven’t dug into the implementation any further.
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>>
>>
>>
>> d
>>
>