Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!purdue!decwrl!ucbvax!CORY.BERKELEY.EDU!dillon
From: dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: suggestion for next release of shell
Message-ID: <8805070218.AA25227@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 7 May 88 02:18:27 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Lines: 13

:.... which reminds me of a very strange undocumented feature in shell
:which I haven't seen discussed: If the first character typed on the
:command line is a numeric that lines gets eaten, as if it were a comment.
:
:As this is done quite deliberately (look at the source), this cannot be
:called a bug. But why? What's wrong with a program "1off"?

	It is a well-known bug.  The command interpreter ignores numbers
as command names (or commands starting with a number) due to the way it
handles error conditions.  I know I should fix it ...   See the 
description of COMMANDS and the _except variable for more info.

					-Matt