backgrounded jobs

[Elliott Hughes <Elliott.Hughes@genedata.com>]

something i had in my own hacked-about copy of
Byron's rc is a line that output not just the pid of
a backgrounded job, rather the string "kill %i\n", on
the basis that this was the number one use of the
pid. it's particularly handy in 9term, but probably
just as useful in xterm.

how would people feel about making this part of
the distribution? i admit that it looks odd at first
because traditional shells don't work like that; you
probably have to know why its saying that not to
be disconcerted by it, but i think its usefulness
outweighs this, not least because rc users aren't
likely to be neophyte shell users who want
everything to be just like it is in sh (or bash these
days, i suppose).

Plan 9 rc doesn't do this, but that's probably
because "kill %i |rc\n" would just look _too_
weird. that, or they didn't think of it.

i also have a replacement for the shift built-in
that does the things whose absence is listed as
a bug on the man page, if anyone's interested.
i used it in a big nasty rc script once, before
i repented and stopped writing complicated
things as shell scripts. it's only a couple of
lines longer than the current builtin, and it
would mean we could remove a "bug",
though.

[i assume i'm on this list: i subscribed but
haven't seen anything. but i haven't seen
anything on wilyfans in the same period,
so maybe things are just quiet.]

	- Elliott

-- 
"Act Swiss. Be Global." -- ABB Werbung, 1999.