Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sun-barr!newstop!sun!quintus!pds
From: pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: links - forget UNIX; what about AMIGA?
Message-ID: <1251@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 13 Sep 89 21:38:09 GMT
References: <14187@netnews.upenn.edu> <1410031@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM> <1989Sep13.022711.7311@agate.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 44

In article <1989Sep13.022711.7311@agate.berkeley.edu> mwm@eris.berkeley.edu (Mike (I'll think of something yet) Meyer) writes:
>And I didn't respond because it was old hat. The idea of processes
>that get invoked to supply data when a file is read has been around
>for a long time - long enough to be in the original 4.2BSD design
>spec, among other places. For some reason, they don't seem to catch
>on. I suspect that they just aren't that usefull.

Gee, I'd expect this to be VERY useful.  How about a COMPRESS: device
that uncompresses a file as you read it.  you could compress all your .h
files (important to us floppy-only users) and your C compiler would
uncompress as it read.  And writing to, say, COMPRESS:DF0:foo.Z would
write a compressed file df0:foo.Z.  Sounds very useful to me.

It would also be nice to have a ZOO: device that handles zoo archives.
So instead of doing

    1> mkdir df0:foo

you could do

    1> ln -s zoo:df0:foo.zoo foo

and then

    1> cp #?.c foo

would create a zoo archive of all your .c files, and

    1> dir foo

would get you a listing of the contents of the archive.  There are lots
of things like this that would be really useful.  How about SCCS: or
RCS:?

It would be great if all this could be done with just an AREXX: device,
with scripts that invoke compress or zoo, but I don't see how the AREXX:
device would tell the script it started whether it wanted to read,
write, examine, exnext, delete a file, or whatever.  But then, I don't
know AREXX.  Is this possible?

-- 
-Peter Schachte
pds@quintus.uucp
...!sun!quintus!pds