[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Rob Pike]

In the v8 shell, the "whatis" command's output is all parseable by the
shell to recreate the item being identified. For instance, "whatis HOME"
would print

   HOME=/usr/rob

while "whatis cd"

would print

   builtin cd

and so on. I failed to convince POSIX or other forces to adopt this, and to
this day remain puzzled why people couldn't see its value, even though of
course not having an editable typescript does limit the flexibility
somewhat.

Plan 9 happened soon after.

-rob


On Fri, Jan 6, 2023 at 12:22 AM Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

> Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> writes:
>
> > Wow!  Small programs that do one thing and do it well connected together
> to
> > do more complicated things?  What an awesome idea :-)
>
> *grin*
>
> Sometimes people call it "screen scraping", and seem to think it's wrong
> to desire parseable output from commands.  I like to point them at this:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0&t=358
>
> -tih
> --
> Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
> of Lisp.  Lisp is the most important idea in computer science.  --Alan Kay
>
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