On 2020-08-14, Jason McIntyre <j...@kerhand.co.uk> wrote:
> - i cannot work out what is with the \! examples. i know we try to make
> entries work for both csh and sh style shells, but stuff like this
> works without escaping:
>
> $ find . ! -type f
Going through the CVS and SCCS history, I see that the examples
came with a rewrite of find(1) at Berkeley 30 years ago.
csh's behavior that "for convenience, a `!' is passed unchanged
when it is followed by a blank, tab, newline, `=' or `('" has been
documented as such at least since the start of the CSRG repository
in 1985.
bash, whose history substitution was modeled on csh, also shares
this behavior.
I think it was never necessary to escape the '!' and the man page
examples were written with an abundance of caution and a lack of
understanding of csh's exact replacement mechanism.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de
