[comp.sys.mac] Mac Interface, and ways to have a "Command Line" interface

clive@drutx.ATT.COM (Clive Steward) (01/10/89)

From article <2969@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>, by bmartin@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Brian Martin):
> 
> There have been a number of times where I've wanted to drop into
> a command line interface and type a little Bourne/Korn-shell style script
> to do a global change to a group of files. For example, before shipping
> a group of nroff source files to the Mac, for conversion to Word,


Brian,

Since you're not in a 'student situation' evidently, might suggest
that you would really like to have the MPW system, perhaps without
compilers if you don't do programming on the Mac, in which case it's
pretty cheap for what it does.

I use it all the time for just the sort of unixish things you're
talking about.  There's a functional grep (search) in it, and many other 
unix tools are available for free, as people have been porting public
domain versions of them as MPW tools.  I have at the moment awk, sed,
sort, (hold the phone, thank goodness for Multifinder), m4 (macro pp), 
and lex and yacc replacements, which have their uses.

The shell environment is much more rich than Unix -- for instance, one 
of the utilities shipped as an example is a visual diff which lets you
see the files side by side, and ship autoselected differences back and
forth to either.  Like vsdiff, if you've seen that.  This is written
in MPW shell, which language can smoothly do window, cut/paste and 
menu functions.

The Projector included with 3.0 is a neat 'source control' system,
which can just as easily be used for word processing documents as
for computer code.

The only complaint is the one you've heard about interactive prompting
programs, and I suspect we'll have method for this soon, if the getarounds 
seem bothersome enough.  Doesn't come up with pipeable programs, or
the kind of operations you were describing.

Cheers,

Clive Steward