how do i simulate a null character from the keyboard?

[Dennis McCunney]

> -----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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