davis@utx1.UUCP (Gary A. Davis) (11/16/87)
Is there any better SHELL available for OS9 LII (CoCo) than the one supplied?
I would like to have a few of the features I have come to appreciate in the
UNIX ksh such as history and wild-card expansion. Other nice things would be
environment variables (especially PATH with an appropriate fork that would
search the path).
I am aware of a mod to the keyboard driver what allows command line editing
(could someone post this) which would be useful.
Thanks,
Gary Davis
Sugar Software
--
Gary A. Davis
Racal-Milgo, P.O. Box 407044, Fort Lauderdale, Fl 33340, (305) 476-4393
{allegra,codas}!novavax!utx1!davisbelmonte@svax.cs.cornell.edu (Matthew Belmonte) (11/19/87)
In article <1792@utx1.UUCP> davis@utx1.UUCP (Gary A. Davis) writes: >Is there any better SHELL available for OS9 LII (CoCo) than the one supplied? >I would like to have a few of the features I have come to appreciate in the >UNIX ksh such as history and wild-card expansion. Other nice things would be >environment variables (especially PATH with an appropriate fork that would >search the path). a clarification - the fork syscall doesn't search the path. the shell looks up the correct path for a given program name and hands the full path name to fork (or, more precisely for UNIX, forks and then hands the full path name to execve). i don't know much about level 2 (it's been about a year since i've fired up my old level 1 system), but it seems that if you have source code or a good disassembler or debugger, it wouldn't be much of a problem to add or patch in a history mechanism. UNIX-style environment variables would be more difficult, i think, because they're a function of the operating system. such a modification would involve rewriting the F$fork call. as for a path variable, that's possible, although it does involve the overhead of searching the entire path when the shell starts up or when you do a rehash. this may or may not be acceptable, depending on how fast your main i/o device is. for floppies i think it's not worth it. it would be nice if you have a hard disk or RAM disk, though. Disclaimer: my 6809 hacking days are over, so don't expect me to do any of this. i'm still wondering whether i'm better off now with Turing machines... -- Matthew Belmonte Internet: belmonte@svax.cs.cornell.edu BITNET: belmonte@CRNLCS *** The Knights of Batman *** (Computer science 1, College 5, Johns Hopkins CTY Lancaster '87 session 1)