[fennecfoxen]

I taught myself C on MS-DOS in middle school, decades ago. Could have sworn that ASCII 26 was named “EOF” even if modern text files don’t include it.

This is a supplementary source of confusion.

[wongarsu]

Wikipedia supports this:

> Character 26 was used to mark "End of file" even if the ASCII calls it Substitute, and has other characters for this. Number 28 which is called "File Separator" has also been used for similar purposes. [1]

I think today we would think of character 4 (End of Transmission, Ctrl-D) as the end of file/input marker, but historically Character 26/Ctrl-Z was used, even on disk.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_character

[pwdisswordfish2]

See, this is why you should not believe Wikipedia.

The DOS syscall interface has no concept of an EOF character. ^Z being considered EOF was a feature of the COPY command, later replicated by the runtimes of various languages targetting DOS.

http://jdebp.info/FGA/dos-character-26-is-not-special.html

[Doctor_Fegg]

Not just DOS. CP/M also used CTRL-Z, principally because file lengths weren’t stored on disk - just the list of 128-byte blocks. So to get granularity beyond multiples of 128, you need an explicit EOF character.

[giovannibajo1]

I think TYPE would also treat ^Z as a terminator of the file. I think it was common in DOS to have binary files with a textual header followed by ^Z, that would hide the binary part.

[nixpulvis]

Yea, it's confusing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22572703, read EDIT 3, I found this pretty illuminating.