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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re: /bin/true
Message-ID: <523@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 3-May-86 15:23:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.523
Posted: Sat May  3 15:23:07 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 6-May-86 03:51:09 EDT
References: <481@batcomputer.TN.CORNELL.EDU> <518@looking.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.ARPA
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL)
Lines: 31

In article <469@ncr-sd.UUCP> greg@ncr-sd.UUCP (Greg Noel) writes:
>... if you add a new machine type,
>you have to put in a link on every machine in the world.

No, just on the development machines containing code for that
machine type.  In particular, "elif" won't evaluate the new
machine-type command if an earlier instance is satisfied.

>A better scheme
>would have been a single command, say "machid", that only consisted of the
>command "echo gould".  Then, the usual sequence of:
>...
>(an exageration, admittedly, but do \you/ have links for all those machines?)

Most of them..

>becomes:
>	case `machid` in
>	pdp11)	... ;;
>...
>	*)	echo "I don't know how to handle machine-type `machid`" ;;
>	esac

I agree that this is a better approach; `uname -m` is supposed
to return a machine-type string like that.  However, AT&T did
their usual number on "uname" and various vendors were left with
no guidance as to the correct meaning of the various fields.
Usually they put out useless garbage for `uname -m` instead of
the desired generic machine type.

N.B. The same machine type should be pre#defined by CPP.