Altos XENIX/SCO XENIX

[Mark Horton]

>[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 <wisner at cis.ohio-state.edu> 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.