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RE: how do i simulate a null character from the keyboard?
- From: Dennis McCunney <DMcCunney at roperasw dot com>
- To: cygwin at cygwin dot com
- Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 13:31:49 -0500
- Subject: RE: how do i simulate a null character from the keyboard?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: szeil@notesmail.cs.odu.edu [mailto:szeil@notesmail.cs.odu.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 1:08 PM
> To: cygwin@cygwin.com
> Cc: emallove@yahoo.com
> Subject: Re: how do i simulate a null character from the keyboard?
> ctrl-z, by the way, used as the terminator by MSDOS and other
> early PC operating systems was an unintentionally humorous
> choice. It's defined as the SUB character, used as
> a placeholder to indicate the data lost during a garbled
> transmission.
MS-DOS inherited the usage from CP/M. CP/M used it because the CP/M
directory did not store exact length of the file. A marker was needed to
specify where the file actually ended if the file size was not an exact
multiple of disk block size.
> Steve Z
______
Dennis
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