From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from burdell.cc.gatech.edu ([130.207.3.207]) by hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu with SMTP id <2230>; Tue, 18 May 1993 13:08:56 -0400 Received: from penfold.cc.gatech.edu by burdell.cc.gatech.edu with SMTP id AA27279 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for ); Tue, 18 May 1993 13:08:43 -0400 Received: by penfold.cc.gatech.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA05746; Tue, 18 May 93 13:08:40 EDT From: arnold@cc.gatech.edu (Arnold Robbins) Message-Id: <9305181708.AA05746@penfold.cc.gatech.edu> Date: Tue, 18 May 1993 13:08:40 -0400 In-Reply-To: Alan Watson's 52-line message on May 18, 1:01pm X-Ultrix: Just Say NO! X-Important-Saying: Premature Optimization Is The Root Of All Evil. X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.3 5/22/91) To: rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu Subject: Re: A delicious thought Everything old is new again..... I read in an early history of unix paper that on the very early unix systems (pdp-7 vintage!) everything in fact worked this way. You typed a command. The shell exec'ed it, and then the code in exit() would re-exec the shell. When they added fork to the system, they noticed that 'cd' didn't take them anywhere.... At that point it became built-in to the shell. I could almost see doing this with limit. cd is a bit expensive, methinks (just think about the TWO call through nami. One to find cd, the next to do the chdir. ugh) Arnold