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From: rosenkra@convex.com (William Rosencranz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: MiNT sh(1) (maybe)
Message-ID: <1991Mar11.050129.1828@convex.com>
Date: 11 Mar 91 05:01:29 GMT
References: <1991Mar10.220416.8388@doe.utoronto.ca>
Sender: news@convex.com (news access account)
Organization: Convex Computer Corporation; Richardson, TX
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In article <1991Mar10.220416.8388@doe.utoronto.ca> david@doe.utoronto.ca (David Megginson) writes:
>how would everyone feel about changing the system() function in
>the MiNT library to use the shell rather than simulating it? The

i would love to see this, especially for make(1). the problem is not
really with system per se, it is with the assortment of shells we have.
most seem too large. as a compromise, you could write a system which
contains some of the more important shell parsing, globbing, path finding,
etc. i have a system which at least does the path search, but it is not
hashed, of course (which is no big deal since spawned shells have to
hash from scratch anyway). i also like the idea of a real smart shell
which would just save context when spawning so the text segment already
in memory is used (i.e. simulating a smart VM pager). gulam is not
very robust here, and awkward to say the least (and i never was able
to jump back into gulam in my system call).

>would also work. I'd also like to get #! <shell> support built into
>MiNT, so that we could run shell scripts from the desktop or shell
>without fooling around with silly extensions like .ksh .sh .g .bat
>etc. (bash emulates this, but it should probably be in the kernel)

yes, this too would be nice. however, ls(1) still may not find
executable scripts (and flag with "*" under -F option)
unless it reads the first line of every file (painfully slow).
there is no "executable" bit in the DTA, as i recall. maybe the
archive bit could be used (i have never really found a use for it
otherwise).

-bill
rosenkra@convex.com

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Bill Rosenkranz            |UUCP: {uunet,texsun}!convex!c1yankee!rosenkra
Convex Computer Corp.      |ARPA: rosenkra%c1yankee@convex.com