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From: mwm@violet.berkeley.edu (Mike (With friends like these, who needs hallucinations) Meyer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: What should be in future SKsh versions?
Message-ID: <1989Dec11.060208.3668@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 11 Dec 89 06:02:08 GMT
References: <13920018@hpfelg.HP.COM> <AZTz25K00Uka8Bt052@andrew.cmu.edu> <bfea02ID72lX01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Reply-To: mwm@violet.berkeley.edu (Mike (With friends like these, who needs hallucinations) Meyer)
Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica
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In article <bfea02ID72lX01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> kim@uts.amdahl.com (Kim DeVaughn) writes:
<I am all for leaving it up to the user to decide which commands, or specific
<implementations thereof, to use.   Absolutely.

Yes indeed!

<However, there is a fundemental problem that exists that builtin's allow you
<to get around.  That is the braindamaged limitation on the length of the
<command line that AmigaDOS can handle.  Something like 256 bytes.  Ridiculous!

It's 25[56] bytes. The problem is really with BCPL, though. It can't
handle string longer than that because it encodes the length of the
string in a byte.

Since 1.4 is now in C (or so everyone assures me), this should now be
fixable. Bill Hawes has a patch for Execute that allows the strings to
be arbitrarily long - after all, the caller has allocated the space,
so bother limiting it? He also has versions of WShell and ARexx
(inhouse test only, unfortunately) which allow arbitrarily long
strings. Long lines break a lot of things (I think he said "most of
ARP", but it's been a while), including some of his code (now fixed).

That looks like a reasonable route to me for ksh, though. Push
everything out to res, or a shared library.

The shared library approach is particulary appealing if the libraries
use the WSHell format. That would allow for WShell users to import the
sksh libraries, and sksh users who own WShell to use the WShell
libraries.

To add a real request: I'd like the () notation form anonymous
pipelines that Unix ksh has. A string delimited by () is run as a
command pipeline, with it's standard output going to an anonymous
pipe. That pipe's name is substituted in the command line. So you can
diff the sorted versions of two unsorted files by:

	diff (sort file1) (sort file2)

I don't know of anyway to do this without some form of temporary file
(AmigaDOS gets to put them in PIPE:, of course) without such a
feature.

	<mike
--
My feet are set for dancing,				Mike Meyer
Won't you turn your music on.				mwm@berkeley.edu
My heart is like a loaded gun,				ucbvax!mwm
Won't you let the water run.				mwm@ucbjade.BITNET