Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!iuvax!purdue!mentor.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!ea.ecn.purdue.edu!housel
From: housel@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Peter S. Housel)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: A full, V7-Compatible expr(1)
Summary: "Configure" will have to wait
Message-ID: <13706@ea.ecn.purdue.edu>
Date: 26 Jul 89 01:35:33 GMT
References: <13618@ea.ecn.purdue.edu> <2898@yunexus.UUCP> <600@amms4.UUCP>
Sender: housel@ea.ecn.purdue.edu
Reply-To: housel@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Peter S. Housel)
Organization: Purdue University Engineering Computer Network
Lines: 52

In article <600@amms4.UUCP>, hjg@amms4 (Harry Gross) writes:
>If someone has posted diffs for 'expr' already (or a replacement for
>it), please let me know (by email, preferably), and I will keep my
>work to myself (unless there is a great demand to see it :-).  If I
>haven't heard from anyone by the time I finish, I will post my diffs
>to the net.

	Huh? Look at the article referenced in the one you followed up
(<13618@ea.ecn.purdue.edu>), in which a full working replacement was
posted.  If it has expired already I can mail it to you.

>Oddly enough, I just started to work on this problem myself.  I wanted to run
>the Configure script that comes with 'patch', and got bitten by the lack of
>the ':' operator in the MINIX version of 'expr'.  A slightly closer look
>revealed that MINIX 'expr' doesn't handle any strings at all.

	This, unfortunately, isn't all that will bite. A few other
potential problems, once expr is replaced:

1) tr(1) has minor bugs, mainly in argument parsing. I replaced it
with a freely redistributable Berkeley version, but since it uses
stdio, and the Minix stdio is a bit slow, it slowed tr down by a
factor of almost three for a large file.

2) test(1) is not completely compatible either. It doesn't accept
spaces before and after numbers, and doesn't permit the "["-hack.
I have fixes for these, soon to be posted.

3) There is no awk(1) - Configure uses it in one or two places.  I
have GNU Awk (version 1.02, the "Old AWK" version) working, and it
requires my floating point package.  I will probably post GAWK in late
August.

4) The biggest problem is the shell. The main shell problem is that
it does \-quoting all wrong, both inside and outside of here documents.
It also dumped core with memory faults a couple times while running through
Configure. In general, it doesn't stand up under really heavy use in
shell scripts.

5) There was another problem somewhere which caused things to crash -
a grep was left running in the background, both the script shell and
the login shell died, and there was a continuous stream of login: prompts.
I haven't traced this down.

	How's this: I'll offer a US$5.00 reward to the first person to
run the "Configure" script that comes with Larry Wall's Patch 2.0 at
patchlevel 12 under Minix. Changing the script is NOT allowed, and
the fixes for the Minix utilities should be documented sufficiently
for me to duplicate them. Fixes should not interfere with the normal
workings of the Minix utilities and shell.

-Peter S. Housel-	housel@ecn.purdue.edu		...!pur-ee!housel