ksh incompatabilities with sh?

[Lawrence V. Cipriani]

In article <16147 at brl-adm.ARPA> rbj at ICST-CMR.ARPA (Root Boy Jim) writes:
?? From: "Lawrence V. Cipriani" <lvc at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
	...
?? Many of our customers still use ^ for pipes, that's what they got used
?? to.  They have been using various versions of UNIX for at least 12 years.
?? Old habits die hard as the saying goes.
?What I want to know is how they got used to it. Hasn't `|' *always* been
?the symbol for a pipe? When was `^' introduced? A history lesson please!

Before the Bourne shell there was the Mashey shell.  It supported ^ for
the pipe symbol not |.  This was a very primitive shell. A lot of its
functionality was in separate programs due to limited memory size.
For example wild card were expanded in a separate process, yuck.
When the Bourne shell was written it inherited the ^, not sure why
the change occurred.  Maybe it wasn't universally available, or perhaps
it was just easier to type on Bourne's terminal :-).

-- 
Larry Cipriani, AT&T Network Systems and Ohio State University
Domain: lvc at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Path: ...!cbosgd!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!lvc (strange but true)