20 Jul
2020
20 Jul
'20
5:55 p.m.
On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 11:25 AM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As y'all know, I'm a relative latecomer to
the world of Unix, but I do try
to figure out how y'all did it back when. So, sometimes, as in this case, I
can figure out how to do something, but I'm curious how it was done back in
the day, moreso than how I can get it done today. I'm looking at the
patching of my shiny new 2.11 BSD pl 431 system running on my speedy little
virtual PDP-11/70, so I grabbed patch 432 (here's a portion of the patch):
...
To install the update cut where indicated below and save to a file
(/tmp/432) and then:
cd /tmp
sh 432
./432.sh
./432.rm
sh 432.shar
patch -p0 < 432.patch
Watch carefully for any rejected parts of the patch. Failure of a
patch typically means the system was not current on all preceeding
updates _or_ that local modifications have been made.
...
====== cut here
#! /bin/sh
# This is a shell archive, meaning:
# 1. Remove everything above the #! /bin/sh line.
# 2. Save the resulting text in a file.
# 3. Execute the file with /bin/sh (not csh) to create:
# 432.rm
# 432.sh
# 432.shar
# 432.patch
...
# End of shell archive
This seems straightforward. Just follow the directions et voila magic
happens.
My questions for y'all are how would you go about doing this? Use vi to
delete everything through the ==== cut here line? Use some combination of
standard unix tools to chop it up? What was your workflow for patching up
the system using these files?
sed -e '1,/---cut here---/d' < $patch | sh -x
is what I use, but there's a wide variety of 'cut here' lines in the
2.11BSD patches, so I have had to taylor to each patch.
In my world, if I screw something up, it's 15
seconds to run a restore
script in my simh directory and I can try again, so my level of concern for
a mistake is pretty low. If I was doing this in 1980, on real hardware, I
would have had many concerns, as I'm sure some of y'all can remember, how
did you prepare and protect yourselves so a patch was successful.
Yea, it was always a crap-shoot back in the day on slow hardware. Backups
on tape were your best bet :(.
BTW, I thought .shar was an archive format, so when I
saw the patch was a
shar file, I was worried it would be in some binary form, lo and behold, it
looks like text to me... not even b64. So much to learn, so little time.
It is and it isn't. Mostly isn't for these patches. libarchive supports it,
but there's no standard and what libarchive supports is quite limited.
Warner
Thanks,
Will
--
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