Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdcad!sun!birdland!rberlin
From: rberlin%birdland@Sun.COM (Rich Berlin)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs
Subject: Re: A find-file Hack
Message-ID: <74562@sun.uucp>
Date: 25 Oct 88 20:59:18 GMT
References: <8810251636.AA10923@ELI.CS.YALE.EDU>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Distribution: gnu
Lines: 35
In-reply-to: ram-ashwin@YALE.ARPA's message of 25 Oct 88 16:36:54 GMT


To simulate ls -l using file-attributes is certainly possible, but
since there doesn't seem to be an elisp-interface to getpwent, you
have to search /etc/passwd for the uid number (and punt or do
something else ugly if you're using a name server like NFS, where the
entry may not be in /etc/passwd....)  On my machine (a Sun 3/160,
12MB, running 4.0), using /bin/ls is acceptably fast and a lot easier.

But, now I am thinking about trying to support the getpwent function.
Opinions (especially from RMS) about the practice of adding interfaces
to system calls?  It certainly raises the risk of writing
system-specific emacs extensions!


By the way, I've had other occasions when I wanted the output of a command,
so I wrote a function which, rather than applying 'message to the buffer
contents, returns them as a string.  It's easy to then pass the string to
message:

(defun results-of-command (command &rest args)
  "Execute the given COMMAND with &rest ARGS, and return the resulting\n\
output as a string."
  (let (foo
	(temp-buffer-show-hook
	 '(lambda (buffer)
	    (set-buffer buffer)
	    (setq foo (buffer-substring (point-min) (1- (point-max))))
	    (kill-buffer buffer))))
    (save-excursion
      (with-output-to-temp-buffer "*results of command*"
	(apply 'call-process command nil standard-output nil args))
    foo)))


-- Rich