That Crazy Caret
mlip at NADC.ARPA
mlip at NADC.ARPA
Sat Sep 8 00:40:25 AEST 1984
[ What's up, Doc?]
I have found an interesting feature with Berkeley's 4.1 Bourne shell.
Valid command arguments that begin with '^' (the caret character)
evince strange behavior. The output of such commands are first sent
to limbo, and then the shell strips the '^' from the argument and tries
to execute the argument.
Example:
ls ^date
gives the date and nothing more.
Also:
date ^pwd
shows the current directory and nothing more.
Try:
fred ^any_valid_command
The shell behaves correctly when the caret is protected with
quotes. Switching tty drivers does not solve the problem.
Is the caret an undocumented metacharacter or is this a side
effect of Berkeley's "history" feature in the cshell?
Michael Lipczynski
mlip at nadc
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