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From: Jonathan Sergent <sergent@IO.COM>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
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In-Reply-To: <20010612094321.76E9A19A06@mail.cse.psu.edu>
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 09:26:17 -0700
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On Tuesday, June 12, 2001, at 02:51 AM, rog@vitanuova.com wrote:

> only problem is that's not very efficient, and possibly wrong (for
> packet oriented connections, such as UDP), as it can only read one
> character at a time...

Yes, that was bugging me too.  But what else can you do if you might end 
up in a subprocess?  You end up with magic to seek the file descriptor 
backwards to cover up the fact that you read too much, and turning off 
buffering on file descriptors where seek doesn't work.

> that buffering problem was the reason i implemented a getlines
> primitive in the inferno std module which defines its own loop:
>
> 	getlines {
> 		echo line: $line
> 	} < filename

That seems kind of awkward.  You might not want to do your reads in a 
loop; you might want to do them in multiple places; perhaps inside a 
function.

> still, i'm not sure that shell scripts are the right place to be
> implementing network protocols (although i can't say i'm entirely
> innocent).

I've done HTTP, FTP, and RTSP in ksh-88... oh, well.