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From: eichin@athena.mit.edu (Mark W. Eichin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: chsh /usr/bin/perl
Message-ID: <1991Jun25.191046.9359@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 25 Jun 91 19:10:46 GMT
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Reply-To: eichin@athena.mit.edu
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Actually, as someone who used gnuemacs as my shell for several months,
I've considered using perl as a shell. The trick is that many of the
commands which you'd expect to run as system("foo") are now available
as perl scripts... I'vve been porting pieces of my working environment
to perl, and grabbing things off the net. As part of my startup, I
have one perl script which 4 "finger"s, sends the output via "zwrite"
(a Project Athena networked write that has the end effect of popping
up an X window), does a nameserver lookup (and fetches the Athena
global motd) and does an xrdb load (loads my X resources.) 
	Even though there is some significant overhead in starting up
a perl process, I am saved the overhead of at least a dozen forks (and
on a 3MIPS  machine, heavily loaded by the xterms starting up, that is
noticeable.)
	Maybe if perl checked argv[0] on startup, and if it was "-"
ran $ENV{"HOME"}/.perlrc ...

				_Mark_ <eichin@athena.mit.edu>
				MIT Student Information Processing Board
				Watchmaker Computing <eichin@watch.com>