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-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==- : - * ____ \ / \|/ BRoTHeRHooD oF WaReZ: : / | \ __* __ || +-------* BRoTHeRHooD oF WaReZ: :The Brotherhood | o / ___| \ / | -++- \__/> / BRoTHeRHooD oF WaReZ: :Speaks Once | \/ \ | | | -++- | | BRoTHeRHooD oF WaReZ: :Again. Phear. | o ) o | .o / || ___| |__ BRoTHeRHooD oF WaReZ: : |___/\___/ \/\/ |________|BRoTHeRHooD oF WaReZ: -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=+- Th1s 4rt1cle c0nta1ns th3 4nsw3rs t0 s0me Fr3qu3ntly 4sked Questions ab0ut UN1X. Th1s art1cle 1ncludes answers t0: 1) H0w d0 1 rem0ve a f1le wh0se name beg1ns w1th a "-" ? 2) H0w d0 1 rem0ve a f1le w1th funny characters 1n the f1lename ? 3) H0w d0 1 get a recurs1ve d1rect0ry l1st1ng? 4) H0w d0 1 get the current d1rect0ry 1nt0 my pr0mpt? 5) H0w d0 1 read characters fr0m a term1nal w1th0ut requ1r1ng the user t0 h1t RETURN? 6) H0w d0 1 read characters fr0m the term1nal 1n a shell scr1pt? 7) H0w d0 1 check t0 see 1f there are characters t0 be read w1th0ut actually read1ng? 8) H0w d0 1 f1nd the name 0f an 0pen f1le? 9) H0w d0 1 rename "*.f00" t0 "*.bar", 0r change f1le names t0 l0wercase? 10) Why d0 1 get [s0me strange err0r message] when 1 "rsh h0st c0mmand" ? 11) H0w d0 1 f1nd 0ut the creat10n t1me 0f a f1le? 12) H0w d0 1 use "rsh" w1th0ut hav1ng the rsh hang ar0und unt1l the rem0te c0mmand has c0mpleted? 13) H0w d0 1 truncate a f1le? 14) H0w d0 1 ¤set an env1r0nment var1able, change d1rect0ry 1ns1de a shell scr1pt and have that change affect my current shell? 15) Why d0esn't f1nd's "¤" symb0l d0 what 1 want? 16) H0w d0 1 red1rect std0ut and stderr separately 1n csh? 17) H0w d0 1 set the perm1ss10ns 0n a symb0l1c l1nk? 18) When s0me0ne refers t0 'rn(1)' 0r 'ct1me(3)', what d0es the number 1n parentheses mean? 19) What d0es ¤awk,grep,fgrep,egrep,b1ff,cat,gec0s,nr0ff,tr0ff,tee,bss stand f0r? 20) H0w d0es the gateway between "c0mp.un1x.quest10ns" and the "1nf0-un1x" ma1l1ng l1st w0rk? 21) H0w d0 1 pr0n0unce "v1" , 0r "!", 0r "/*", 0r ...? 1f y0u're l00k1ng f0r the answer t0, say, quest10n 14, and want t0 sk1p everyth1ng else, y0u can search ahead f0r the regular express10n "^14)". Wh1le these are all leg1t1mate quest10ns, they seem t0 cr0p up 1n c0mp.un1x.quest10ns 0n an annual bas1s, usually f0ll0wed by plenty 0f repl1es (0nly s0me 0f wh1ch are c0rrect) and then a per10d 0f gr1p1ng ab0ut h0w the same quest10ns keep c0m1ng up. Y0u may als0 l1ke t0 read the m0nthly art1cle "Answers t0 Frequently Asked Quest10ns" 1n the newsgr0up "news.ann0unce.newusers", wh1ch w1ll tell y0u what "UN1X" stands f0r. W1th the var1ety 0f Un1x systems 1n the w0rld, 1t's hard t0 guarantee that these answers w1ll w0rk everywhere. Read y0ur l0cal manual pages bef0re try1ng anyth1ng suggested here. 1f y0u have suggest10ns 0r c0rrect10ns f0r any 0f these answers, please send them t0 t0 sahayman@1uvax.cs.1nd1ana.edu 0r 1uvax!sahayman. 1) How do I remove a file whose name begins with a "-" ? Figure out some way to name the file so that it doesn't begin with a dash. The simplest answer is to use rm ./-filename (assuming "-filename" is in the current directory, of course.) This method of avoiding the interpretation of the "-" works with other commands too. Many commands, particularly those that have been written to use the "getopt(3)" argument parsing routine, accept a "--" argument which means "this is the last option, anything after this is not an option", so your version of rm might handle "rm -- -filename". Some versions of rm that don't use getopt() treat a single "-" in the same way, so you can also try "rm - -filename". 2) How do I remove a file with funny characters in the filename ? The classic answers are rm -i some*pattern*that*matches*only*the*file*you*want which asks you whether you want to remove each file matching the indicated pattern; depending on your shell, this may not work if the filename has a character with the 8th bit set (the shell may strip that off); and rm -ri . which asks you whether to remove each file in the directory, answer "y" to the problem file and "n" to everything else., and which, unfortunately, doesn't work with many versions of rm; (always take a deep breath and think about what you're doing and double check what you typed when you use rm's "-r" flag) and find . -type f ... -ok rm '¤' Ø; where "..." is a group of predicates that uniquely identify the file. One possibility is to figure out the inode number of the problem file (use "ls -i .") and then use find . -inum 12345 -ok rm '¤' Ø; or find . -inum 12345 -ok mv '¤' new-file-name Ø; "-ok" is a safety check - it will prompt you for confirmation of the command it's about to execute. You can use "-exec" instead to avoid the prompting, if you want to live dangerously, or if you suspect that the filename may contain a funny character sequence that will mess up your screen when printed. If none of these work, find your system manager. 3) How do I get a recursive directory listing? One of the following may do what you want: ls -R (not all versions of "ls" have -R) find . -print (should work everywhere) du -a . (shows you both the name and size) If you're looking for a wildcard pattern that will match all ".c" files in this directory and below, you won't find one, but you can use % some-command find . -name '*.c' -print "find" is a powerful program. Learn about it. 4) How do I get the current directory into my prompt? It depends which shell you are using. It's easy with some shells, hard or impossible with others. C Shell (csh): Put this in your .cshrc - customize the prompt variable the way you want. alias setprompt 'set prompt="$¤cwd% "' setprompt # to set the initial prompt alias cd 'chdir Ø!* && setprompt' If you use pushd and popd, you'll also need alias pushd 'pushd Ø!* && setprompt' alias popd 'popd Ø!* && setprompt' Some C shells don't keep a $cwd variable - you can use pwd instead. If you just want the last component of the current directory in your prompt ("mail% " instead of "/usr/spool/mail% ") you can use alias setprompt 'set prompt="$cwd:t% "' Some older csh's get the meaning of && and || reversed. Try doing: false && echo bug If it prints "bug", you need to switch && and || (and get a better version of csh.) Bourne Shell (sh): If you have a newer version of the Bourne Shell (SVR2 or newer) you can use a shell function to make your own command, "xcd" say: xcd() ¤ cd $* ; PS1="pwd $ "; If you have an older Bourne shell, it's complicated but not impossible. Here's one way. Add this to your .profile file: LOGIN_SHELL=$$ export LOGIN_SHELL CMDFILE=/tmp/cd.$$ export CMDFILE PROMPTSIG=16 export PROMPTSIG trap '. $CMDFILE' $PROMPTSIG and then put this executable script (without the indentation!), let's call it "xcd", somewhere in your PATH : xcd directory - change directory and set prompt : by signalling the login shell to read a command file cat >$¤CMDFILE?"not set" <<EOF cd $1 PS1="ØpwdØ$ " EOF kill -$¤PROMPTSIG?"not set" $¤LOGIN_SHELL?"not set" Now change directories with "xcd /some/dir". Korn Shell (ksh): Put this in your .profile file: PS1='$PWD $ ' If you just want the last component of the directory, use PS1='$¤PWD##*/ $ ' 5) How do I read characters from a terminal without requiring the user to hit RETURN? Check out cbreak mode in BSD, ÄICANON mode in SysV. If you don't want to tackle setting the terminal parameters yourself (using the "ioctl(2)" system call) you can let the stty program do the work - but this is slow and inefficient, and you should change the code to do it right some time: main() ¤ int c; printf("Hit any character to continueØn"); /* * ioctl() would be better here; only lazy * programmers do it this way: */ system("/bin/stty cbreak"); c = getchar(); system("/bin/stty -cbreak"); printf("Thank you for typing %c.Øn", c); exit(0); You might like to check out the documentation for the "curses" library of portable screen functions. Often if you're interested in single-character I/O like this, you're also interested in doing some sort of screen display control, and the curses library provides various portable routines for both functions. 6) How do I read characters from the terminal in a shell script? In sh, use read. It is most common to use a loop like while read line do ... done In csh, use $< like this: while ( 1 ) set line = "$<" if ( "$line" == "" ) break ... end Unfortunately csh has no way of distinguishing between a blank line and an end-of-file. If you're using sh and want to read a *single* character from the terminal, you can try something like echo -n "Enter a character: " stty cbreak readchar=dd if=/dev/tty bs=1 count=1 2>/dev/null stty -cbreak echo "Thank you for typing a $readchar ." 7) How do I check to see if there are characters to be read without actually reading? Certain versions of UNIX provide ways to check whether characters are currently available to be read from a file descriptor. In BSD, you can use select(2). You can also use the FIONREAD ioctl (see tty(4)), which returns the number of characters waiting to be read, but only works on terminals, pipes and sockets. In System V Release 3, you can use poll(2), but that only works on streams. In Xenix - and therefore Unix SysV r3.2 and later - the rdchk() system call reports whether a read() call on a given file descriptor will block. There is no way to check whether characters are available to be read from a FILE pointer. (Well, there is no *good* way. You could poke around inside stdio data structures to see if the input buffer is nonempty but this is a bad idea, forget about it.) Sometimes people ask this question with the intention of writing if (characters available from fd) read(fd, buf, sizeof buf); in order to get the effect of a nonblocking read. This is not the best way to do this, because it is possible that characters will be available when you test for availability, but will no longer be available when you call read. Instead, set the O_NDELAY flag (which is also called FNDELAY under BSD) using the F_SETFL option of fcntl(2). Older systems (Version 7, 4.1 BSD) don't have O_NDELAY; on these systems the closest you can get to a nonblocking read is to use alarm(2) to time out the read. 8) How do I find the name of an open file? In general, this is too difficult. The file descriptor may be attached to a pipe or pty, in which case it has no name. It may be attached to a file that has been removed. It may have multiple names, due to either hard or symbolic links. If you really need to do this, and be sure you think long and hard about it and have decided that you have no choice, you can use find with the -inum and possibly -xdev option, or you can use ncheck, or you can recreate the functionality of one of these within your program. Just realize that searching a 600 megabyte filesystem for a file that may not even exist is going to take some time. 9) How do I rename "*.foo" to "*.bar", or change file names to lowercase? Why doesn't "mv *.foo *.bar" work? Think about how the shell expands wildcards. "*.foo" "*.bar" are expanded before the mv command ever sees the arguments. Depending on your shell, this can fail in a couple of ways. CSH prints "No match." because it can't match "*.bar". SH executes "mv a.foo b.foo c.foo *.bar", which will only succeed if you happen to have a single directory named "*.bar", which is very unlikely and almost certainly not what you had in mind. Depending on your shell, you can do it with a loop to "mv" each file individually. If your system has "basename", you can use: C Shell: foreach f ( *.foo ) set base=basename $f .foo mv $f $base.bar end Bourne Shell: for f in *.foo; do base=basename $f .foo mv $f $base.bar done Some shells have their own variable substitution features, so instead of using "basename", you can use simpler loops like: C Shell: foreach f ( *.foo ) mv $f $f:r.bar end Korn Shell: for f in *.foo; do mv $f $¤f%foobar done If you don't have "basename" or want to do something like renaming foo.* to bar.*, you can use something like "sed" to strip apart the original file name in other ways, but the general looping idea is the same. A program called "ren" that does this job nicely was posted to comp.sources.unix some time ago. It lets you use ren '*.foo' '#1.bar' Shell loops like the above can also be used to translate file names from upper to lower case or vice versa. You could use something like this to rename uppercase files to lowercase: C Shell: foreach f ( * ) mv $f echo $f | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' end Bourne Shell: for f in *; do mv $f echo $f | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' done If you wanted to be really thorough and handle files with funny' names (embedded blanks or whatever) you'd need to use Bourne Shell: for f in *; do eval mv '"$f"' Ø"echo "$f" | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'Ø" done 9't. It happens to be harmless to include them in this particular example; versions of tr that don't want the [] will conveniently think they are supposed to translate '[' to '[' and ']' to ']'). If you have the "perl" language installed, you may find this rename script by Larry Wall very useful. It can be used to accomplish a wide variety of filename changes. #!/usr/bin/perl # # rename script examples from lwall: # rename 's/Ø.orig$//' *.orig # rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/ unless /^Make/' * # rename '$_ .= ".bad"' *.f # rename 'print "$_: "; s/foo/bar/ if <stdin> =Ä /^y/i' * $op = shift; for (@ARGV) ¤ $was = $_; eval $op; die $@ if $@; rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_; 10) Why do I get [some strange error message] when I "rsh host command" ? (We're talking about the remote shell program "rsh" or sometimes "remsh"; on some machines, there is a restricted shell called "rsh", which is a different thing.) If your remote account uses the C shell, the remote host will fire up a C shell to execute 'command' for you, and that shell will read your remote .cshrc file. Perhaps your .cshrc contains a "stty", "biff" or some other command that isn't appropriate for a non-interactive shell. The unexpected output or error message from these commands can screw up your rsh in odd ways. Fortunately, the fix is simple. There are, quite possibly, a whole *bunch* of operations in your ".cshrc" (e.g., "set history=N") that are simply not worth doing except in interactive shells. What you do is surround them in your ".cshrc" with: if ( $?prompt ) then operations.... endif and, since in a non-interactive shell "prompt" won't be set, the operations in question will only be done in interactive shells. You may also wish to move some commands to your .login file; if those commands only need to be done when a login session starts up (checking for new mail, unread news and so on) it's better to have them in the .login file. 11) How do I find out the creation time of a file? You can't - it isn't stored anywhere. Files have a last-modified time (shown by "ls -l"), a last-accessed time (shown by "ls -lu") and an inode change time (shown by "ls -lc"). The latter is often referred to as the "creation time" - even in some man pages - but that's wrong; it's the time the file's status was last changed, either by writing or changing the inode (via mv or chmod, etc...). The man page for "stat(2)" discusses this. 12) How do I use "rsh" without having the rsh hang around until the remote command has completed? (See note in question 10 about what "rsh" we're talking about.) The obvious answers fail: rsh machine command & or rsh machine 'command &' For instance, try doing rsh machine 'sleep 60 &' and you'll see that the 'rsh' won't exit right away. It will wait 60 seconds until the remote 'sleep' command finishes, even though that command was started in the background on the remote machine. So how do you get the 'rsh' to exit immediately after the 'sleep' is started? The solution - if you use csh on the remote machine: rsh machine -n 'command >&/dev/null </dev/null &' If you use sh on the remote machine: rsh machine -n 'command >/dev/null 2>&1 </dev/null &' Why? "-n" attaches rsh's stdin to /dev/null so you could run the complete rsh command in the background on the LOCAL machine. Thus "-n" is equivalent to another specific "< /dev/null". Furthermore, the input/output redirections on the REMOTE machine (inside the single quotes) ensure that rsh thinks the session can be terminated (there's no data flow any more.) Note: on the remote machine, you needn't redirect to/from /dev/null; any ordinary file will do. In many cases, various parts of these complicated commands aren't necessary. 13) How do I truncate a file? The BSD function ftruncate() sets the length of a file. Xenix - and therefore SysV r3.2 and later - has the chsize() system call. For other systems, the only kind of truncation you can do is truncation to length zero with creat() or open(..., O_TRUNC). 14) How do I ¤set an environment variable, change directory inside a shell script and have that change affect my current shell? You can't, unless you use a special command to run the script in the context of the current shell rather than in a child program. The process environment (including environment variables and current directory) is inherited by child programs but cannot be passed back to parent programs. For instance, if you have a C shell script named "myscript": cd /very/long/path setenv PATH /something:/something-else or the equivalent Bourne or Korn shell script cd /very/long/path PATH=/something:/something-else export PATH and try to run "myscript" from your shell, your shell will fork and run the shell script in a subprocess. The subprocess is also running the shell; when it sees the "cd" command it changes *its* current directory, and when it sees the "setenv" command it changes *its* environment, but neither has any effect on the current directory of the shell at which you're typing (your login shell, let's say). In order to get your login shell to execute the script (without forking) you have to use the "." command (for the Bourne or Korn shells) or the "source" command (for the C shell). I.e. you type . myscript to the Bourne or Korn shells, or source myscript to the C shell. If all you are trying to do is change directory or set an environment variable, it will probably be simpler to use a C shell alias or Bourne/Korn shell function. See the "how do I get the current directory into my prompt" section of this article for some examples. 15) Why doesn't find's "¤" symbol do what I want? "find" has a -exec option that will execute a particular command on all the selected files. Find will replace any "¤" it sees with the name of the file currently under consideration. So, some day you might try to use "find" to run a command on every file, one directory at a time. You might try this: find /path -type d -exec command ¤/Ø* Ø; hoping that find will execute, in turn command directory1/* command directory2/* ... Unfortunately, find only expands the "¤" token when it appears by itself. Find will leave anything else like "¤/*" alone, so instead of doing what you want, it will do command ¤/* command ¤/* ... once for each directory. This might be a bug, it might be a feature but we're stuck with the current behaviour. So how do you get around this? One way would be to write a trivial little shell script, let's say "./doit", that consists of command "$1"/* You could then use find /path -type d -exec ./doit ¤ Ø; Or if you want to avoid the "./doit" shell script, you can use find /path -type d -exec sh -c 'command $0/*' ¤ Ø; (This works because within the 'command' of "sh -c 'command' A B C ...", $0 expands to A, $1 to B, and so on.) If all you're trying to do is cut down on the number of times that "command" is executed, you should see if your system has the "xargs" command. Xargs reads arguments one line at a time from the standard input and assembles as many of them as will fit into one command line. You could use find /path -print | xargs command which would result in command file1 file2 file3 file4 dir1/file1 dir1/file2 Unfortunately this is not a perfectly robust or secure solution. Xargs expects its input lines to be terminated with newlines, so it will be confused by files with odd characters such as newlines in their names. 16) How do I redirect stdout and stderr separately in csh? In csh, you can redirect stdout with ">", or stdout and stderr together with ">&" but there is no direct way to redirect stderr only. The best you can do is ( command >stdout_file ) >&stderr_file which runs "command" in a subshell; stdout is redirected inside the subshell to stdout_file, and both stdout and stderr from the subshell are redirected to stderr_file, but by this point stdout has already been redirected so only stderr actually winds up in stderr_file. Sometimes it's easier to let sh do the work for you. sh -c 'command >stdout_file 2>stderr_file' 17) How do I set the permissions on a symbolic link? Permissions on a symbolic link don't really mean anything. The only permissions that count are the permissions on the file that the link points to. 18) When someone refers to 'rn(1)' or 'ctime(3)', what does the number in parentheses mean? It looks like some sort of function call, but it isn't. These numbers refer to the section of the "Unix manual" where the appropriate documentation can be found. You could type "man 3 ctime" to look up the manual page for "ctime" in section 3 of the manual. The standard manual sections are: 1 User-level commands 2 System calls 3 Library functions 4 Devices and device drivers 5 File formats 6 Games 7 Various miscellaneous stuff - macro packages etc. 8 System maintenance and operation commands Some Unix versions use non-numeric section names. For instance, Xenix uses "C" for commands and "S" for functions. Each section has an introduction, which you can read with "man # intro" where # is the section number. Sometimes the number is necessary to differentiate between a command and a library routine or system call of the same name. For instance, your system may have "time(1)", a manual page about the 'time' command for timing programs, and also "time(3)", a manual page about the 'time' subroutine for determining the current time. You can use "man 1 time" or "man 3 time" to specify which "time" man page you're interested in. You'll often find other sections for local programs or even subsections of the sections above - Ultrix has sections 3m, 3n, 3x and 3yp among others. 19) What does ¤awk,grep,fgrep,egrep,biff,cat,gecos,nroff,troff,tee,bss stand for? awk = "Aho Weinberger and Kernighan" This language was named by its authors, Al Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan. grep = "Global Regular Expression Print" grep comes from the ed command to print all lines matching a certain pattern g/re/p where "re" is a "regular expression". fgrep = "Fixed Grep". fgrep searches for fixed strings only. The "f" does not stand for "fast" - in fact, "fgrep foobar *.c" is usually slower than "egrep foobar *.c" (yes, this is kind of surprising. Try it.) Fgrep still has its uses though, and may be useful when searching a file for a larger number of strings than egrep can handle. egrep = "Extended Grep" egrep uses fancier regular expressions than grep. Many people use egrep all the time, since it has some more sophisticated internal algorithms than grep or fgrep, and is usually the fastest of the three programs. cat = "catenate" catenate is an obscure word meaning "to connect in a series", which is what the "cat" command does to one or more files. Not to be confused with C/A/T, the Computer Aided Typesetter. gecos = "General Electric Comprehensive Operating System" When GE's large systems division was sold to Honeywell, Honeywell dropped the "E" from "GECOS". Unix's password file has a "pw_gecos" field. The name is a real holdover from the early days. Dennis Ritchie has reported: "Sometimes we sent printer output or batch jobs to the GCOS machine. The gcos field in the password file was a place to stash the information for the $IDENT card. Not elegant." nroff = "New ROFF" troff = "Typesetter ROFF" These are descendants of "roff", which was a re-implementation of the Multics "runoff" program. tee = T From plumbing terminology for a T-shaped pipe splitter. bss = "Block Started by Symbol" Dennis Ritchie says: Actually the acronym (in the sense we took it up; it may have other credible etymologies) is "Block Started by Symbol." It was a pseudo-op in FAP (Fortran Assembly [-er?] Program), an assembler for the IBM 704-709-7090-7094 machines. It defined its label and set aside space for a given number of words. There was another pseudo-op, BES, "Block Ended by Symbol" that did the same except that the label was defined by the last assigned word + 1. (On these machines Fortran arrays were stored backwards in storage and were 1-origin.) The usage is reasonably appropriate, because just as with standard Unix loaders, the space assigned didn't have to be punched literally into the object deck but was represented by a count somewhere. biff = "biff" This command, which turns on asynchronous mail notification, was actually named after a dog at Berkeley. I can confirm the origin of biff, if you're interested. Biff was Heidi Stettner's dog, back when Heidi (and I, and Bill Joy) were all grad students at U.C. Berkeley and the early versions of BSD were being developed. Biff was popular among the residents of Evans Hall, and was known for barking at the mailman, hence the name of the command. Confirmation courtesy of Eric Cooper, Carnegie Mellon University Don Libes' book "Life with Unix" contains lots more of these tidbits. 20) How does the gateway between "comp.unix.questions" and the "info-unix" mailing list work? "Info-Unix" and "Unix-Wizards" are mailing list versions of comp.unix.questions and comp.unix.wizards respectively. There should be no difference in content between the mailing list and the newsgroup. To get on or off either of these lists, send mail to Info-Unix-Request@brl.mil or Unix-Wizards-Request@brl.mil . Be sure to use the '-Request'. Don't expect an immediate response. Here are the gory details, courtesy of the list's maintainer, Bob Reschly. ==== postings to info-UNIX and UNIX-wizards lists ==== Anything submitted to the list is posted; I do not moderate incoming traffic -- BRL functions as a reflector. Postings submitted by Internet subscribers should be addressed to the list address (info-UNIX or UNIX- wizards); the '-request' addresses are for correspondence with the list maintainer [me]. Postings submitted by USENET readers should be addressed to the appropriate news group (comp.unix.questions or comp.unix.wizards). For Internet subscribers, received traffic will be of two types; individual messages, and digests. Traffic which comes to BRL from the Internet and BITNET (via the BITNET-Internet gateway) is immediately resent to all addressees on the mailing list. Traffic originating on USENET is gathered up into digests which are sent to all list members daily. BITNET traffic is much like Internet traffic. The main difference is that I maintain only one address for traffic destined to all BITNET subscribers. That address points to a list exploder which then sends copies to individual BITNET subscribers. This way only one copy of a given message has to cross the BITNET-Internet gateway in either direction. USENET subscribers see only individual messages. All messages originating on the Internet side are forwarded to our USENET machine. They are then posted to the appropriate newsgroup. Unfortunately, for gatewayed messages, the sender becomes "news@brl-adm". This is currently an unavoidable side-effect of the software which performs the gateway function. As for readership, USENET has an extremely large readership - I would guess several thousand hosts and tens of thousands of readers. The master list maintained here at BRL runs about two hundred fifty entries with roughly ten percent of those being local redistribution lists. I don't have a good feel for the size of the BITNET redistribution, but I would guess it is roughly the same size and composition as the master list. Traffic runs 150K to 400K bytes per list per week on average. 21) How do I pronounce "vi" , or "!", or "/*", or ...? You can start a very long and pointless discussion by wondering about this topic on the net. Some people say "vye", some say "vee-eye" (the vi manual suggests this) and some Roman numerologists say "six". How you pronounce "vi" has nothing to do with whether or not you are a true Unix wizard. Similarly, you'll find that some people pronounce "char" as "care", and that there are lots of ways to say "#" or "/*" or "!" or "tty" or "/etc". No one pronunciation is correct - enjoy the regional dialects and accents. Since this topic keeps coming up on the net, here is a comprehensive pronunciation list that has made the rounds in the past. This list is maintained by Maarten Litmaath, maart@cs.vu.nl . Names derived from UNIX are marked with *, names derived from C are marked with +, names derived from (Net)Hack are marked with & and names deserving futher explanation are marked with a #. The explanations will be given at the very end. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- SINGLE CHARACTERS -- SPACE, blank, ghost& ! EXCLAMATION POINT, exclamation (mark), (ex)clam, excl, wow, hey, boing, bang#, shout, yell, shriek, pling, factorial, ball-bat, smash, cuss, store#, potion&, not*+, dammit*# " QUOTATION MARK, (double) quote, dirk, literal mark, rabbit ears, double ping, double glitch, amulet&, web&, inverted commas # CROSSHATCH, pound, pound sign, number, number sign, sharp, octothorpe#, hash, fence, crunch, mesh, hex, flash, grid, pig-pen, tictactoe, scratch (mark), (garden)gate, hak, oof, rake, sink&, corridor&, unequal# $ DOLLAR SIGN, dollar, cash, currency symbol, buck, string#, escape#, ding, big-money, gold& % PERCENT SIGN, percent, mod+, shift-5, double-oh-seven, grapes, food& & AMPERSAND, and, amper, address+, shift-7, andpersand, snowman, bitand+, donald duck#, daemon&, background* ' APOSTROPHE, (single) quote, tick, prime, irk, pop, spark, glitch, lurker above& * ASTERISK, star, splat, spider, aster, times, wildcard*, gear, dingle, (Nathan) Hale#, bug, gem&, twinkle, funny button#, pine cone, glob* () PARENTHESES, parens, round brackets, bananas, ears, bowlegs ( LEFT PARENTHESIS, (open) paren, so, wane, parenthesee, open, sad, tool& ) RIGHT PARENTHESIS, already, wax, unparenthesee, close (paren), happy, thesis, weapon& + PLUS SIGN, plus, add, cross, and, intersection, door&, spellbook& , COMMA, tail, trapper& - HYPHEN, minus (sign), dash, dak, option, flag, negative (sign), worm, bithorpe# . PERIOD, dot, decimal (point), (radix) point, spot, full stop, put#, floor& / SLASH, stroke, virgule, solidus, slant, diagonal, over, slat, slak, across#, compress#, reduce#, replicate#, spare, divided-by, wand&, forward slash : COLON, two-spot, double dot, dots, chameleon& ; SEMICOLON, semi, hybrid, giant eel&, go-on# <> ANGLE BRACKETS, angles, funnels, brokets, pointy brackets < LESS THAN, less, read from*, from*, in*, comesfrom*, crunch, sucks, left chevron#, open pointy (brack[et]), bra#, upstairs&, west > GREATER THAN, more, write to*, into/toward*, out*, gazinta*, zap, blows, right chevron#, closing pointy (brack[et]), ket#, downstairs&, east = EQUAL SIGN, equal(s), gets, becomes, quadrathorpe#, half-mesh, ring& ? QUESTION MARK, question, query, whatmark, what, wildchar*, huh, ques, kwes, quiz, quark, hook, scroll& @ AT SIGN, at, each, vortex, whirl, whirlpool, cyclone, snail, ape, cat, snable-a#, trunk-a#, rose, cabbage, Mercantile symbol, strudel#, fetch#, shopkeeper&, human&, commercial-at [] BRACKETS, square brackets, U-turns, edged parentheses [ LEFT BRACKET, bracket, bra, (left) square (brack[et]), opensquare, armor& ] RIGHT BRACKET, unbracket, ket, right square (brack[et]), unsquare, close, mimic& Ø BACKSLASH, reversed virgule, bash, (back)slant, backwhack, backslat, escape*, backslak, bak, scan#, expand#, opulent throne&, slosh, slope, blash ^ CIRCUMFLEX, caret, carrot, (top)hat, cap, uphat, party hat, housetop, up arrow, control, boink, chevron, hiccup, power, to-the(-power), fang, sharkfin, and#, xor+, wok, trap&, pointer#, pipe*, upper-than# _ UNDERSCORE, underline, underbar, under, score, backarrow, flatworm, blank, chain&, gets#, dash# GRAVE, (grave/acute) accent, backquote, left/open quote, backprime, unapostrophe, backspark, birk, blugle, backtick, push, backglitch, backping, execute#, boulder&, rock& ¤ BRACES, curly braces, squiggly braces, curly brackets, squiggle brackets, Tuborgs#, ponds, curly chevrons#, squirrly braces, hitchcocks#, chippendale brackets# ¤ LEFT BRACE, brace, curly, leftit, embrace, openbrace, begin+, fountain& RIGHT BRACE, unbrace, uncurly, rytit, bracelet, close, end+, a pool& | VERTICAL BAR, pipe*, pipe to*, vertical line, broken line#, bar, or+, bitor+, vert, v-bar, spike, to*, gazinta*, thru*, pipesinta*, tube, mark, whack, gutter, wall& Ä TILDE, twiddle, tilda, tildee, wave, squiggle, swung dash, approx, wiggle, enyay#, home*, worm, not+ -- MULTIPLE CHARACTER STRINGS -- !? interrobang (one overlapped character) */ asterslash+, times-div# /* slashterix+, slashaster := becomes# <- gets << left-shift+, double smaller <> unequal# >> appends*, cat-astrophe, right-shift+, double greater -> arrow+, pointer to+, hiccup+ #! sh'bang, wallop Ø!* bash-bang-splat () nil# && and+, and-and+, amper-amper, succeeds-then* || or+, or-or+, fails-then* -- NOTES -- ! bang comes from old card punch phenom where punching ! code mad e a loud noise; however, this pronunciation is used in the (non- computerized) publishing and typesetting industry in the U.S. too, so ... ! store from FORTH ! dammit as in "quit, dammit!" while exiting vi and hoping one hasn't clobbered a file too badly # octothorpe from Bell System (orig. octalthorpe) # unequal e.g. Modula-2 $ string from BASIC $ escape from TOPS-10 & donald duck from the Danish "Anders And", which means "Donald Duck" * splat from DEC "spider" glyph * Nathan Hale "I have but one asterisk for my country." * funny button at Pacific Bell, * was referred to by employees as the "fu nny button", which did not please management at all when it became part of the corporate logo of Pacific Telesis, the holding company ... */ times-div from FORTH = quadrathorpe half an octothorpe - bithorpe half a quadrathorpe (So what's a monothorpe?) . put Victor Borge's Phonetic Punctuation which dates back to th middle 1950's / across APL / compress APL / reduce APL / replicate APL := becomes e.g. Pascal ; go-on Algol68 < left chevron from the military: worn vertically on the sleeve to signif y rating < bra from quantum mechanics <> unequal e.g. Pascal > right chevron see "< left chevron" > ket from quantum mechanics @ snable-a from Danish; may translate as "trunk-a" @ trunk-a "trunk" = "elephant nose" @ strudel as in Austrian apple cake @ fetch from FORTH Ø scan APL Ø expand APL ^ and from formal logic ^ pointer from PASCAL ^ upper-than cf. > and < _ gets some alternative representation of underscore resembles a backarrow _ dash as distinct from '-' == minus execute from shell command substitution ¤ Tuborgs from advertizing for well-known Danish beverage ¤ curly chevr. see "< left chevron" ¤ hitchcocks from the old Alfred Hitchcock show, with the stylized profi le of the man ¤ chipp. br. after Chippendale chairs | broken line EBCDIC has two vertical bars, one solid and one broken. 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