go@orstcs.cs.ORST.EDU (04/29/87)
This may not be a bug, but a "feature"... I have tried unsuccessfully to create "shar" format archives that would successfully "unshar." The problem seems (with a rather skant glance at sh) to be that sh tries to read in the entire shell script file into internal structures before acting on it. This causes the shell to choke if the shar is longer than about (a guess -- haven't tried a binary search yet) 15k. After looking at a few of the sh.* files and finding a comment density of 1:500 lines, I don't relish going in and changing anything massively. Besides, I'd probably just screw it up -- sh works pretty d**m good as it is. What I want to know is, has anyone written a "simple shell" ala some of the MS-DOS "sh" routines for unsharing that they would like to convert and post. What is needed is a simple line-at-a-time shell that knew about the redirection stuff but not about all the shell variables and things (at least parameter substitution could be ignored -- $VAR would be nice.) I'd write one, but am overcommitted as it is. For Minix sh, simply knowing about "gres" would probably be sufficient. Any thoughts? Gary Oliver ...!hp-pcd!hplabs!orstcs!go (Until they pull my plug)
go@orstcs.cs.ORST.EDU (04/29/87)
In my previos posting of sh/shar incompatibility, I boogered my signature. It should read: Gary Oliver ...!hplabs!hp-pcd!orstcs!go (Until they pull my plug.)