From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail.core.genedata.com ([157.161.173.16]) by hawkwind.utcs.utoronto.ca with SMTP id <25033>; Thu, 10 Jun 1999 17:04:58 -0400 Received: from relay.ch.genedata.com (pinatubo-e0.ch.genedata.com [157.161.173.48]) by mail.core.genedata.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA28415 for ; Thu, 10 Jun 1999 11:48:07 +0200 Received: (from enh@localhost) by relay.ch.genedata.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id LAA1263150 for rc@hawkwind.utcs.utoronto.ca; Thu, 10 Jun 1999 11:48:06 +0200 (CEST) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 05:48:06 -0400 From: Elliott Hughes Message-Id: <199906100948.LAA1263150@relay.ch.genedata.com> To: rc@hawkwind.utcs.utoronto.ca Subject: backgrounded jobs 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.