SJONES%HAMPVMS.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu (Steve Jones) (02/13/89)
}Date: Sat, 11 Feb 89 20:55:48 GMT }From: Willy Konijnenberg <willy@IDCA.TDS.PHILIPS.NL> }Subject: Re: gres for BSD } }In article <8413@louie.udel.EDU> Leisner.Henr@xerox.com (Marty) writes: }>BTW, where did gres come from? Was it standard on Version 7? }> }I never heard of it before MINIX, but I recently found that it is also }in the MKS toolkit, a collection of unixy programs on MS-DOS. } [...] }Now was MINIX gres inspired by MKS, or the other way around, or is }there still a third party involved? Well, I can't speak for Andy, but the following comes from page 111 of _The_UNIX_Programming_Environment_, by Kernighan and Pike 1984 during a discussion of the grep family of commands and sed: "... Programs do die, however. There was once a program called gres that did simple substitution, but it expired almost immediately when sed was born." An interesting observation, as most people seem to be advocating it's demise now. Anyway, my guess is that Andy either had it leftover from 6th/7th edition, or it was cleaner to get up than sed, or what have you. It does the basic job. Gres is a common denominator for all Minix systems - even where sed is un- available. If you have sed, you can run the shar through sed to change all occurances of gres to sed commands, then unshar the file. If you have gres, you can do the same. The command line for going either way is around twenty odd characters, and quite frankly I don't think it's that large-scale problem. The most likely place to run into it is with old shars, and I don't expect anyone to go through and update them. I think a much more profitable point of standardization is the construction of an easy mechanism for upgrading to a new version of Minix. Or for that matter, agreeing on a new minimum configuration on which to run new versions of Minix. Tacit agreement works okay with things like having a hard disk, but witness the chaos surrounding EGA support. Even just a source for lorder/tsort that will compile with the standard 1.2 libraries would be a boon. --Steve. BITNET: sjones@hampvms INET: sjones%hampvms.bitnet@mitvma.mit.edu CSNET: sjones%hamp@umass-cs UUCP: ...uunet!hampvms.bitnet!sjones USnail: box 753; Hampshire College; Amherst, MA 01002 "When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave." -- The Tao of Programming