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From: gnb@bby.oz (Gregory N. Bond)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: C news: file ownership and running build 47386 times
Message-ID: <GNB.89Nov20152916@baby.bby.oz>
Date: 20 Nov 89 04:29:16 GMT
References: <3054@splut.conmicro.com>
Sender: news@melba.bby.oz.au
Organization: Burdett, Buckeridge and Young Ltd.
Lines: 52
In-Reply-To: jay@splut.conmicro.com's message of 18 Nov 89 14:17:08 GMT

In article <3054@splut.conmicro.com> jay@splut.conmicro.com (Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard) writes:

   On top of all this, I've lost count of the times I've had to abort build
   because I forgot to tell it that I don't have mkdir(), or that my chown
   is /bin/chown, or... Can't build be set up to remember what it did last
   time? (Yes, Henry, I'll make the changes if you'd like.)

Well, the n-thousandth time I ran build, I hacked in a new feature: a
shell function for read (yes, I know, non-portable) that, given stdin
from a tty just did a read, otherwise did an echo and a line number.
You can the say 
	tee input | ./build
first time round, and from then on
	./build < input

The line numbers in the output from build help in correcting the
mistakes in the input file.

Yes.  This is ugly.

Insert near the top of build:

	if test -t 0 ; then
		read=read
	else
		read=my_read
		lineno=0
		my_read () {
			read inp
			lineno=`expr $lineno + 1`
			echo $inp "  [line $lineno]"
			eval $1='"$inp"'
		}
	fi

Then replace all occurences of /^[ \t]*read/ with $read.

When run, it gives an output like:
	What user id should be used for news files [news]? news   [line 1]
	What group id should be used for news files [news]? news   [line 2]
	What user id should be used for news programs [bin]? bin   [line 3]
	What group id should be used for news programs [bin]? staff   [line 4]
	Do the C News sources belong to bin [yes]? y   [line 5]

You can fire up vi (unless you spilled jelly on the keyboard!) and
edit the input file until it works.  

Henry, have you considered using lwall's configure suite?
--
Gregory Bond, Burdett Buckeridge & Young Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
Internet: gnb@melba.bby.oz.au    non-MX: gnb%melba.bby.oz@uunet.uu.net
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