The shell printed "finished" every time a program gave the machine back.
That made sense when starting a program and getting the machine back was
most of what the machine did and the prompt was the only other thing on
the screen. Under a listing, between two commands, it is noise.
And it was printed whatever the program made of it, so a program that had
just explained what went wrong was answered with the word "finished" -
"there is no such directory: nowhere" and then, immediately, "finished".
The prompt coming back is what says a program is over. It is the same
argument osLastStatus is made of: a program that failed has already said
so in words, and anything the shell adds beside that is the shell talking
over it. A program that FAULTED still says so, because the fault screen
printed in red above and a program that is gone should not look like one
that ended.
A NEWLINE ONLY IF ONE IS WANTED. A program that stopped part way along a
line would leave the prompt sitting in the middle of its last output,
which the word used to prevent by accident. The console knows which
column the cursor is in, so the shell asks - where a blank line printed
every time would be right about half of the time, and an empty directory
listed with ls would be followed by a blank line for no reason.
Fifty nine recorded sessions lose the word. Two of them move a cursor up
a row with it, which is the same fact seen from the screen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
Twenty two lines was right when there was one screen size. It still is on
the forty column screen and wastes three fifths of the eighty column one,
so More asks the rows register instead - which is readable for exactly
this sort of reason.
Rows minus three is twenty two on a twenty five row screen, so nothing
changed underneath anyone already reading files this way. It fills a
bigger screen and leaves a smaller one alone.
A bitmap screen has no rows and says so with a nought, which through an
eight bit subtraction would be 253 lines. Anything under five falls back.
The existing test stopped testing paging the moment this worked: 32 lines
fits in a 47 line page, so the file never paged and the recording lost the
prompt entirely. The fixture is 60 lines now - the INPUT needed moving,
not just the output, which is the failure this project keeps meeting.
And cosmosMoreNarrow, which runs Mode first and pages the same file on the
forty column screen. Two recordings of one file at 47 lines and at 22: a
More that went back to a constant would make them the same length.
Both were verified with break.sh, and the first attempt was a bad break
rather than a bad test - it replaced one of two reads of the rows port and
the other still fetched the real value. Which is a fair argument against
reading a port twice, so it is read once and kept now.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5