Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!pdn!boake2!sherpa!rac
From: rac@sherpa.UUCP (Roger A. Cornelius)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: /usr/bin/diction too! (was /etc/wall)
Message-ID: <8@sherpa.UUCP>
Date: 17 Feb 89 04:37:29 GMT
References: <556@marob.MASA.COM>
Organization: Personal System Computing, St. Petersburg, FL
Lines: 22

From article <556@marob.MASA.COM>, by daveh@marob.MASA.COM (Dave Hammond):
- I rarely (once every few years :-) use /etc/wall, but a recent system
- problem required quickly informing folks.  Attempting to run "wall"
- from a root login, running ksh, resulted in:
- 
- ksh: who^sed: not found
- 
- What? A glance into /etc/wall showed the line:
- 
- who^sed -e 's/^[^ ]* *\([^ ]*\).*/cat \/tmp\/'$$' >\/dev\/\1 \&sleep 2/' | sh
- 
- [ To those under age 40 -- ^ was a synonym for | on machines which
-   didn't include a | keystroke [about 100 years ago :-)].  Therefore, the
-   construct "who^sed" was indented to run "who" and pipe it to "sed". ]

[ Dave's personal gripes deleted ]

You'll probably use /usr/bin/diction once for every thirty times you
use /etc/wall, but it has the same problem :-).

Roger         rac@sherpa
              uunet!sherpa!rac