I'll also add that this seemed foreign when I had patches that had XXX in them I submitted to the linux folks in the early 90s. It was second nature in the BSD side of things. But I don't know if that's a Berkeley thing or a Bell Labs thing Berkeley picked up... Warner On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 12:11 PM Warner Losh wrote: > The earliest my quick grep could find was 4.0BSD. I didn't find it in this > sense in pwb, but it was a quick grep... > > xxx is used extensively in prior versions, but there it's meaning is > 'placeholder' or 'don't care'. Mostly for /tmp/XXXX files, but also for > things like Jxxx handles all the jump commands or dates of the form 24 Feb > XXXX or stuff like that. > > Warner > > On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 11:34 AM Dave Horsfall wrote: > >> For yonks I've been seeing "XXX" as a flag to mean "needs more work" or >> "look at this carefully, just in case" etc, and I use it myself. >> >> Whence did it come about? I think I saw it as early as PWB, but can't be >> sure. >> >> -- Dave, wondering how many nanny-filters he triggered with "XXX" >> >