/usr/bin/diction too! (was /etc/wall)

[Roger A. Cornelius]

>From article <556 at marob.MASA.COM>, by daveh at 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 at sherpa
              uunet!sherpa!rac