[TUHS] Cooked Mode (v8 shell)

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2023 at 09:49:08AM -0500, Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 1/23/23 9:45 AM, Brian M Zick wrote:
> > > 6) It ran in cooked mode.
> > 
> > Sorry if this is obvious to everyone else: What does this phrase mean?
> 
> It did not perform line editing, so it did not change the terminal modes
> and read one character at a time. If you only ever read a line at a time
> from the terminal, you can let the terminal driver do that for you.

I've never been convinced by that particular argument, since if you
want command-line completion, the terminal driver is way too
low-level.

I suppose you could have callouts from the kernel to applications that
were willing to provide context-sensitive command-line completion
lists, which is how Multics handled things (trivia for the day: the
libss library used by Linux's e2fsprogs and MIT Kerberos v5's kadmin
interface uses an API inspired by Multics' subsystem library), but the
point is that you can't do it all in the terminal driver.

Cheers,

						- Ted