Re: Shell scripts

[Paul Guertin <pg@sff.net>]

[pdp groups dropped, apple2 group added]

ptomblin@xcski.com (Paul Tomblin) wrote:

> On the Apple ][, I used to put control characters in the file names on floppy.
> The control characters wouldn't show up in the catalog, which made it harder
> for people to accidentally delete my files.

On the Apple II, I used to accidentally put control characters in the
file name because the keyboard didn't have true N-key rollover. If you
held three keys down simultaneously, it would often (always?) insert a
fourth character among the three. Frex, holding down L, O, and G always
made a Y come out. I knew it was time for bed when most of my CATALOG
commands came out as CATALOYG. (That was before I installed GPLE, which
used the macro ESC-x to catalog drive x.)

Anyway, sometimes the extra character would be a control character, and
if it happened in a SAVE command, DOS 3.3 would happily insert it in
the file name.

I quickly discovered that setting INVERSE mode before doing a CATALOG
made the files with control characters in them stand out: there were
fewer inverse spaces after the filename. When that happened, I dropped
to the monitor (CALL-151) and quickly patched DOS to show control
characters in INVERSE. The patch was a dozen bytes long and I knew it
by heart.

Paul Guertin
pg@sff.net