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NOTICE

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These program need to be able to run on a wide variety of UNIX, UNIX-derived and UNIX-like systems, including some as old as UNIX v7 (c.1980).

Thus they are written in to use ONLY the most minimal, generic, available and portable set of UNIX facilities.

Some facilities that should be avoided, in order to meet the above portability objectives, include:

        basename
        cut
        paste
        join
        awk
        nawk (and gawk, mawk, etc)
        m4
        shell-functions
        nested shell command-substitutions
        getopts
        getopt
        extended regular-expressions (in any context)
        dirname
        dirs
        pushd
        popd
        true
        false
        install
        pax
        cpio
        echo with flags or metacharacters
        cat with flags
        the [ command with flags other than -r -w -x -f and -d
        diff3
        dircmp
        symbolic file-access permissions
        file-access permissions outside the range 0-0777
        non-Bourne-compatible shells or syntax
        xargs
        perl
        printf
        print
        select
        mkdir with flags
        cp with flags
        ln with flags
        rmdir with flags
        rm with flags other than -r and -f
        rdist
        rcp
        rsh
        split
        csplit
        tsort
        typeset
        file