Xref: utzoo comp.unix.xenix:4611 comp.mail.uucp:2678 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ncis.llnl.gov!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!agate!bionet!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!osu-cis!att!cbnews!mark From: mark@cbnews.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix,comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Altos XENIX/SCO XENIX Message-ID: <3395@cbnews.ATT.COM> Date: 23 Jan 89 21:34:27 GMT References: <397@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US> <439@acheron.UUCP> <210@tiamat.FSC.COM> <598@tapa.UUCP> <402@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US> <2148@van-bc.UUCP> <3273@cbnews.ATT.COM> <32171@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <402@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu> Reply-To: mark@cbnews.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) Distribution: na Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 40 >[Mark Horton says:] > >>>Sounds like the -v (verbose) option I added to the 4.0BSD wc command. >>>(It's not in 4.3BSD's wc, Rob Pike made them take it out.) > >and Bill Wisner then asks: > >>Why? >[Chet Ramey Says:] >I would guess that he thought wc's `-v' option was sufficiently removed from >wc's original purpose to be undesirable. (Mark, how much did it increase >code size?) I didn't measure it, but the mods were pretty simple. Unless it brought in printf which wasn't there before or something like that. (It's been 10 years.) I doubt it added more than 15 lines of code. Actually, this is pretty ironic. I took the wc command, added the page count and transmissions time, put in a header, and called it "count". I used it heavily to estimate uucp transfer times. This was while I was at Berkeley. I thought the tool to be generally useful, so I tried to get it into 4BSD. Bill Joy was at the time trying to reduce the size of the manual by combining several small filters into existing commands*, and he said "no" to count. So I made a -v option to wc instead, and while he didn't care much for the functionality, he felt he couldn't object to adding an option. I thought Rob objected to growth of the system, whether by adding options or commands, but if Chet is right, then Rob and I were in agreement about this without realizing it. Mark * "see" became "cat -vt" "ssp" became "cat -s" "num" became "cat -n" The current UNIX system philosophy seems to be that these should become options to the pr command, in conjunction with the -t option.