Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!mintaka!olivea!oliveb!amiga!boing!dale
From: dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: AmigaOS/UNIX - A Suggestion
Message-ID: <915@boing.UUCP>
Date: 25 Oct 90 15:09:10 GMT
References: <606@macuni.mqcc.mq.oz> <1410053@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM> <1990Oct23.060629.6537@engin.umich.edu> <6875@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Reply-To: dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck)
Organization: Boing, Milpitas, Ca.
Lines: 35

In article <6875@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>
>More to the point, I'm not talking about a full UNIX in a box under AmigaOS.
>I'm talking about a UNIX emulation in a hosted environment. UNIX tasks would
>be AmigaOS tasks with extra information attached. The UNIX file system would
>be mapped onto the Amiga file system (using the comment field for that extra
>UNIX file-system info). A unix.library (or posix.library).

This is essentially how the X Window environment is able to run under AmigaDOS.
AmigaDOS is sufficiently similar to Unix to get most generic X programs to compile
and run under AmigaDOS with absolutely no change to the source code. All you need
is a good ANSII C compiler and C support libaries. We add additional routines
to the standard libraries as blink complains about unresolved function calls.

Most of the difficulties are found in spawning new tasks. (Using fork instead of
system calls) or assumptions in file hierarchy. T: versus /tmp/
Sophisticated use of signal() also sometimes is a problem as well as the pipe()
or popen() call.
I think a lot of the user interface problems regarding unix vs AmigaDOS would
be fixed by a properly supported unix like shell from Commodore-Amiga.
If unix wildcard expansion were done by the shell, processes started in
background via '&', all processes were run as separate tasks instead of gloming
onto the current cli process, redirect should work anywhere on the command line,
redirect and append '>>', a real '|' for pipes, and a command separator for
multiple commands on aline.
Maybe this is just a wish list, maybe it already exists in the PD. ;-)

>-- 
>Peter da Silva.   `-_-'
><peter@sugar.hackercorp.com>.


-- 
Dale Luck     GfxBase/Boing, Inc.
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