From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <018001c0f33f$fb7d5c80$6401a8c0@freeze2k>
From: "Matt" <matt@proweb.co.uk>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
References: <20010612094321.76E9A19A06@mail.cse.psu.edu> <0f8901c0f33c$d5319e40$e8b7c6d4@SOMA>
Subject: Re: [9fans] help, i'm in a wet paper bag and I can't get out
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Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 14:02:49 +0100
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I actually started the ircbot as a way to get to grips with plan9 c.

the first one logged in and then spat out the IRC lines on stdout for me to
see what was going on.

My spawning it with & and doing
echo 'PRIVMSG #chann :msg' > /net/tcp/N/data

gave me a fully blown client ! which wasn't bad for 10 lines of C I thought.

and it (false) dawned on me that maybe that was all the C I had to write.

And then after scratching a bit deeper I understood Russ's rlogin script a
bit better and saw that I didn't even need my C to do the connection (and
that's where I fell into the paper bag).

One of the problems the monolithic perl script had was that to add
functionality they had to kill the bot, change the script and then log in
again.

I thought I was able to leverage the namespace feature as a process jail so
I could sandbox the evals. In this was to add new commands to the bot all I
had to do was add new things to it's namespace. That has been the most
disappointing aspect as so much of the checking I've got to do now would
have fallen out of having that sandbox. Oh well. I can understand why.

Thanks to everyone's suggestions. It's been fun to see everyone's favourite
hammer

Use python
Use Limbo
Use C
Use awk

just about everything but "Use perl" !

I've got everything I need to make it work now I think.
Next post from me about it should be the working code.

Matt