On 12/15/14, 7:11 AM, Dan Douglas wrote:
> I understand that read's now basically useless behavior without -r
> was originally there to make using it interactively without a line editor
> slightly easier.
Ask David Korn, since he originally added options to the read builtin.
None of the `pure' Bourne shells ever had it. It may be the case that
it was easier to use \ to enter characters that were special to word
splitting, since without it it's very difficult to read values containing
spaces when using more than one variable.
Chet
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU [email protected] http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/
