Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tektronix!percival!littlei!donk!pmb
From: pmb@donk.UUCP (pmb)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: What does this do?
Message-ID: <232@donk.UUCP>
Date: 18 Jan 89 21:56:23 GMT
References: <2074@questar.QUESTAR.MN.ORG> <1914@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: pmb@.UUCP (Patti Beadles)
Organization: DTO, Intel Corporation; Hillsboro, OR
Lines: 18

In article <1914@ast.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
>In article <2074@questar.QUESTAR.MN.ORG> jeff@questar.QUESTAR.MN.ORG (Jeff Holmes) writes:

>>	My 7 month old daughter was pounding on my keyboard
>>	and she happened to hit
>>		z!| <return>
>>	and my secondary prompt appeared. 

>I am not sure what is going on, but my Sun 3/60 does the same thing.

My guess would be that the pipe symbol at the end is implying that the
command is incomplete, so the system is waiting for the rest.

I just checked the behavior on my (Xenix) machine.  In sh, if I type a command
immediately followed by a pipe symbol, it waits for more input.  If I put a 
space before the pipe, it just does the command.

In csh, it gives me "Invalid null command" either way.