new version of rc

new version of rc

[Byron Rakitzis]

Ok, I'm probably being a little cautious, but I would like to announce
an rc-1.1gamma before I go telling the "real world" about rc-1.1.

It's now available by ftp from archone, as usual. Email-only list members
contact me for a copy.

Many thanks to John Mackin for his ANSI->K&R awk scripts (not general
purpose scripts... just a one-time shot for rc source).

Many thanks also to Boyd Roberts for his history program. Paul Haahr
and I decided to rewrite it ourselves in order to make some changes,
but the qed algorithm was swiped lock, stock and barrel.

I've written a man page for the history program. It's probably really
bad. It's a start, though. If anyone has any suggestions for its
improvement, I'm listening.

Anyway, here's the CHANGES file which should document the changes between
1.1beta and gamma. I hope I didn't leave anything out.

----

Additions since 1.1beta:

John Mackin kindly supplied a set of awk scripts to convert rc's
source into K&R 1 C. To perform the conversion, type "make C".

Paul Haahr and I wrote a history program loosely based upon one
that Boyd Roberts sent to me. Both of these programs are
reimplementations of v8 shell history. Type "make history".

Tom Duff has kindly given permission for his paper "rc - a Shell
for Plan 9 and UNIX Systems" to be distributed in PostScript form
with my rc. The file is called "plan9-rc.ps".

Changes since 1.1beta:

Builtins were changed to flag an error on too many arguments.
Also, the shift builtin now complains if there are no more elements
in $* to shift.

The error message printed by exec() ("foo not found") when it could
not find an executable has been updated to read "Permission denied",
and so on.

Bugs in the home-rolled execve() were fixed.

A compile-time option was added to rc so that rc exports environment
variable names using only the character set [a-zA-Z0-9_]. This is for
braindamaged Bourne shells which don't like characters like - or :
appearing in variable names. rc does this by encoding the variable
name in a hex-based code. It seems to work fine on systems which need
it, but it's definitely a hack.

rc now supports /dev/fd, if you have it.

Occasionally rc would be too overzealous in its reporting of errors,
so a failed call to write() would cause another failed call to
write() (to print the error!!) and so on... Now rc no longer reports
failed calls to write().