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* [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager
@ 2020-06-14 22:52 Warren Toomey
  2020-06-14 23:37 ` Mary Ann Horton
  2020-06-18 12:49 ` [TUHS] Fwd: " Michael Siegel
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 35+ messages in thread
From: Warren Toomey @ 2020-06-14 22:52 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

All, I just received this e-mail from a non-TUHS list member. If you have
an answer for Michael, could you reply to him and pop a cc here as well?

Thanks, Warren

----- Forwarded message from Michael Siegel <msi@malbolge.net> -----

Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:37:59 +0200
From: Michael Siegel <msi@malbolge.net>
To: wkt@tuhs.org
Subject: Origins and life of the pg pager

Hi there,

I'm trying to find out where the pg pager originated.

The research I've done so far vaguely suggests it came with one of the
System V versions, though Internet claims it to be “the name of the
historical utility on BSD UNIX systems” occasionally.[1]

I think System V because the source code of pg.c in the util-linux
package says that this utility is “a clone of the System V CRT paging
utility.”[2]

I'd also like to find out when pg was discarded and if it ever made it
into POSIX before that. Linux still has pg to the very day, but none of
the current major BSDs (Free/Net/Open) offer it. POSIX 2001, 2004
Edition lists it as an excluded utility.[3] I've not been able to get
the text of any prior POSIX documents. It seems they aren't freely
available.

Any ideas on how to proceed?


Best
Michael


[1] This one's from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pg_(Unix)),
    but I've also found other sites stating the same.

[2]
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/tree/text-utils/pg.c

[3] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696899/xrat/xcu_chap04.html

----- End forwarded message -----

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 35+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager
@ 2020-06-21 22:40 Noel Chiappa
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 35+ messages in thread
From: Noel Chiappa @ 2020-06-21 22:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs; +Cc: jnc

    > From: Michael Siegel

    > there's no need to write out "less" every time. You can just alias that
    > to "pg" without causing any harm and save two letters, which is an
    > improvement for a task that is performed manually rather often.
  
It always surpised me that there wasn't more of this - abbreviating the names
of the most-used commands, to minimize typing - or more specifically,
run-length encoding them based on how frequently they were used, with the
most-used ones given the shortest names.

The MIT-DSSR PWB1 system had a pager called just 'p' (source here:

    http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s2/p.c

if anyone wants to see it; the man page is dated Apr/77); and 'ls' was tweaked
to recognize the command name 'l' as an alias for 'ls -ls'.

Of course, aliases didn't exist in the shell back then, which was why the
command had to be coded to recognize the short form, and act differently.
(And /bin/l was linked to /bin/ls.)

'l' and 'p' are _still_ aliased in my shell,to this day!


    > I hope it's okay that I chose to reply just to the list address and take
    > all the other addresses out.

'That's not a bug, that's a feature!'

I always delete other addresses when replying to a list, unless I think someone
might not be subscribed to that list.

      Noel

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 35+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2020-07-05  1:35 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 35+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2020-06-14 22:52 [TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager Warren Toomey
2020-06-14 23:37 ` Mary Ann Horton
2020-06-14 23:52   ` [TUHS] " David Barto
2020-06-15  0:06     ` George Michaelson
2020-06-15  0:31     ` Alan D. Salewski
2020-06-15  0:35       ` Alan D. Salewski
2020-06-15  1:38         ` Warner Losh
2020-06-15  1:47           ` Larry McVoy
2020-06-15  2:38             ` Alec Muffett
2020-06-15  2:46               ` Alec Muffett
2020-06-15  2:26           ` Charles H. Sauer
2020-06-15 14:03           ` Mary Ann Horton
2020-06-15 20:19             ` Greg A. Woods
2020-06-15 20:50               ` Mary Ann Horton
2020-06-15  0:32   ` [TUHS] Fwd: " Nemo Nusquam
2020-06-15  5:41   ` Lars Brinkhoff
2020-06-15 13:56     ` Clem Cole
2020-06-15 14:15       ` Mary Ann Horton
2020-06-15 14:56         ` Clem Cole
2020-06-15 15:04           ` Richard Salz
2020-06-15 16:14             ` Clem Cole
2020-06-15 15:45           ` Lars Brinkhoff
2020-06-15 19:08             ` Lars Brinkhoff
2020-06-21 18:49           ` Michael Siegel
2020-06-22  0:35             ` Greg A. Woods
2020-06-22 16:24               ` Derek Fawcus
2020-06-22 21:33                 ` Rob Pike
2020-06-22 21:58                   ` Kurt H Maier
2020-06-22 21:59                   ` [TUHS] " Bakul Shah
2020-06-22 22:43                     ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2020-06-25  1:50                       ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-06-25 21:31                         ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2020-07-05  1:34                         ` Dave Horsfall
2020-06-18 12:49 ` [TUHS] Fwd: " Michael Siegel
2020-06-21 22:40 Noel Chiappa

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