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* [TUHS] Line Numbers Before SysIII nl? BSD num?
@ 2022-07-24  2:42 Douglas McIlroy
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 2+ messages in thread
From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2022-07-24  2:42 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

I've not seen an earlier post of mine on this topic; apologies if this
is a duplicate. Roff was probably the earliest way to get a
line-numbered file listing. Of course it took a bit of chicanery to
apply it to a roff input file, but even that was not a big shell
script.

As has often been told, Joe Ossanna used to promise of line numbers
(required by USPTO) to attract the Bell Labs patent department as the
first Unix "customer".

Doug

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* [TUHS] Line Numbers Before SysIII nl? BSD num?
@ 2022-07-23  2:57 segaloco via TUHS
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 2+ messages in thread
From: segaloco via TUHS @ 2022-07-23  2:57 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

I've been looking into the history of the nl command lately, which has gotten me curious as to what facilities folks have used at various points in UNIX history for line numbering.

The earliest version of nl I've found is in System III, and it does not derive from Research, PWB, or CB.  Neither does it come from BSD, although BSD has the num command which, according to the source commentary, aims to replicate the '#' behavior of ex.

Were there any other facilities for printing back arbitrary lines from a file with line numbers?

Also, would anyone happen to know if the above appearance of nl might have been from the USG line given none of the others feature it?  It neither seems to be in V8-V10.  nl has managed to find its way into the POSIX standard, so it definitely has some staying power wherever it came from.

- Matt G.

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