Re: All I want for Christmas ...

[John (Deceased persons have no earning capacity) Mackin <john@civil.su. oz.au>]

    If I do:

    	; exec foo
    	foo not found

    then rc dies (as do all other shells, I believe).

Not _all_ other shells, just most of 'em.  The Pike (V8+) version of
sh continues after a failed exec.  I don't think this is too big an
issue, but I lean to the side of continuing, on the basis that if
the user typed the exec interactively and made a typo or was confused,
they probably didn't want their shell to go away.

    2. -s flag

This has been talked about on the list before.  Boyd did this 'cos he
felt he had to.  I sent Boyd's code to Rich Salz.

Personally, as I have said before, I see nothing at all wrong with
adopting command line usage that brings rc more into line with the
defacto standard set by sh, and therefore I am behind -s, if not
heavily.  On the other hand, I find it disappointing that -s
proponents cannot muster anything better than the tired old `I
seem to need this on Ultrix, for reasons I can't explain' argument.
Hell, people!  I have many Ultrix boxes here.  They are good boxes!
The _first_ thing you do on an Ultrix box is build X11R5.  The _second_
thing you do is rm -rf DEATHwindows, and set up xdm and R5.  Come on
up to Freely Distributable X Windows, Your International Passport
To Bitmapped Graphics Pleasure!  You'll Be So Glad You Did!

(Well hell, X is terrible, but it's a gazillion times better than
DEATHwindows.  Of course you might have special graphics hardware,
watch that one.  Luckily, we don't.)

OK,
John.