Re: [9fans] what features would you like in a shell?

["J.R. Mauro" <jrm8005@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 11:29 AM, noagbodjivictor
<noagbodjivictor@gmail.com> wrote:
> hello,
>
> I'm a undergrade CS student doing a project for my introductory
> operating systems class. my team wants to write a simple shell from
> scratch.
>
> one idea we have found so far is the following. the shell will record
> all the programs it has run. whenever a program goes awry and is
> killed by the kernel. the shell will reload it.
>
> what do you think of it?

Bad idea. What if I expect it to die and maybe want to debug it before
running it again? What if the kernel killed it because it was hogging
resources? Respawning something that constantly gets killed will
probably render the machine unusable. What if the program dies really
quickly? The shell could get caught in a very tight loop you can't
interrupt, and the user winds up killing the shell itself and opening
a new one (after getting really aggravated).

I suppose you could make it optional, but then again, why can't the
user just restart the process by hand?

>
> also, we know there are many many shells out there. and our professor
> would not like us to write from scratch. we wanted because it provides
> much exercise. but we certainly don't know about all the shells out
> there.
>
> so I'm writing to get your opinions. maybe there are thing that people
> implement themselves but want included in the shell itself? or just
> something they want implemented?
>
> thanks a lot in advance for your help.
>
>