From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2008 19:12:45 +0100
From: Martin Neubauer <m.ne@gmx.net>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] How to move to rc from sh/bash
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* Pietro Gagliardi (pietro10@mac.com) wrote:
> - The seq statement is standard
> 	for (i in `{seq 1 10}) echo $i

Nope, seq is an external program (subject to the environment). On the other
hand, as Byron's rc is rather extinct by now, chances are if rc is available,
so is seq.

> - aux/getflags is faster than while getopt (no loop involved)
> 	My next plan is to rewrite all of /rc/bin to use aux/getflags. Any
> objections?

Well, that isn't so much about rc's advantages. Keep in mind though that
this would force getflags to be present whenever you need a shell script.
For most installations this isn't an issue, but for those running Plan 9
embedded it is. And with space constraints providing some of /rc/bin might
be reasonable, providing aux/getflags might not. Besides, if a script
doesn't use more than two or three different options getflags doesn't reduce
much complexity (if you aren't writing a new script). And concerning speed,
if command line parsing dominates the execution time I honestly wouldn't
bother.

> And what I dislike:
> - >[2=] is not the same as >[2]/dev/null (some programs crash with
> the former

I don't think it should be the same. Both are special cases for two
different operations.

But what's really great about rc:
% man bash | wc -l
    4898
% man rc | wc -l
     398
If I'd want to check the bash man page for some specific information,
chances are that I'm sound asleep before anything interesting comes up.

	Martin