Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!think!harvard!seismo!rlgvax!hadron!jsdy
From: jsdy@hadron.UUCP (Joseph S. D. Yao)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: Shell history
Message-ID: <334@hadron.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 25-Mar-86 01:44:51 EST
Article-I.D.: hadron.334
Posted: Tue Mar 25 01:44:51 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Mar-86 01:17:45 EST
References: <1512@brl-smoke.ARPA> <140@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: jsdy@hadron.UUCP (Joseph S. D. Yao)
Organization: Hadron, Inc., Fairfax, VA
Lines: 15
Summary: < --

In article <14797@onfcanim.UUCP> dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale) writes:
>But nobody has mentioned what I considered the biggest incentive to change
>over.  In the old, v6 shell, the standard input of any commands that were
>invoked from a shell script was the shell script itself.  ...
>... it meant that you could *not* write shell scripts that were to be
>used as filters, even if their execute bit was set, since the standard input
>of the shell at the time it was forked was no longer available.

The Mashey shell under PWB 1.0 ("System I"), at least the version that
I and many others used, had the construct "< --" to allow one to read
the shell's original stdin.  This was very useful, for all the reasons
Dave mentions.  However, the Bourne mechanism seems better.
-- 

	Joe Yao		hadron!jsdy@seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}