[TUHS] sh: cmd | >file

[Adam Thornton]

> On Jan 6, 2020, at 2:55 PM, Chet Ramey <chet.ramey at case.edu> wrote:
> 
> On 1/6/20 4:29 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> On Mon, 6 Jan 2020, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
>>> Would anyone who uses Bash regularly, both interactively and
>>> for scripting, really want to go back to using the V7 sh
>>> for production work?
>> I have never used all the fancy stuff in BASH such as the arithmetic
>> functions; I still use "expr" etc for portability.
> 
> Portability to what? The POSIX $((...)) arithmetic expansion is widely
> implemented and near-universally available.
> 
> Some of the other things are more esoteric, but you should be able to
> increase your expectation to POSIX features and still be sufficiently
> portable.
> 

Portability to v7, of course!

I mean, I’m joking, but also not.

I felt like v7 might be enough of a daily driver that I could port some fun stuff to it, but…damn, even ex/vi 3.x is huge, jove will take a lot of work, and I can’t find a minimalist screen editor in K&R C.  The best I’ve managed is TE but although there is presumably a Unix port, I couldn’t find it.  Porting termcap and curses was easy, but….the whole reason I want them, initially, is so that I don’t have to use ed.  If anyone knows of a small screen editor that will build easily on v7 I want to know about it.

This is in contrast to 2.11BSD, where, yeah, it’s just Unix, and especially with a TCP/IP stack, is completely usable.  The PDP-11’s 64K address space is constraining and (as it turned out) influences the way I write programs—for my menu front end for ZIP, I started with my usual technique of making a struct with all the fields I’d want for my menu structure, and a linked list of those things, but that turned out to be a hog and a simple **char plus some utility functions to index the elements ended up being completely adequate.

Adam