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

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

> thanks a lot for the reply. i got my hand of the unix programming
> environment by Kernighan and Pike. I don't think we have the
> programming skills for implementing a regular expression engine, but

i would recommend against reimplementing regular expressions.
ken is hard to beat; the standard regexp library is what you want.

the trick is going to be thinking hard about how you are going to
deal with some of the mismatches between standard regular expressions
and file names.  for example, you might need to deal with the fact
that '.' is common in file names, but means any character in a regular
expression.  i think this is going to be the cannonical problem:
	glob	regexp
	*.[ch]	\.[ch]$
	'*'	\*	(this problem is easy)

i don't think this one is about writing lots of code.

> you think the idea of reloading a crashed program is not a good one?

i don't like the idea.

> for example, what if it's a web browser?

how do you determine when to relaunch?  how
do you decide that the program is not going to
relaunch?  how do you stop an errant shell from
relaunching and consuming all your resources?

- erik