WinNT zsh, minor problems

WinNT zsh, minor problems

[ric hotchkiss]

I have been using zsh on WinNT for about 6 weeks now. So far I love it,
but I have two small problems that maybe someone could help me with:

1. When using the read I get no echo of the characters typed in.
   Is there a way to get the characters echoed as they are typed?

2. When running awk/gawk double quotes inside a single quoted script get
removed
   unless quoted with backslash. I am trying to write code for both WinNT and 
   UNIX, \" does not work on UNIX and " does not work for WinNT.

   NT Example:
    gawk '{ printf ("test %s\n", $1) }'         # this works on UNIX
    c:\bin\gawk: cmd. line:1: { printf (test %s\n, $1) }
    c:\bin\gawk: cmd. line:1:           ^ parse error

   UNIX Example:
    gawk '{ printf (\"test %s\n\", $1) }'       # this works on NT
    gawk: cmd. line:1: { printf (\"test %s\n\", $1) }
    gawk: cmd. line:1:           ^ backslash not last character on line

   Is there a syntax that will work on both systems?

Thanx for any hints.

Ric
--
 _____  ______   _____   _____ 
/ ____||  ___ \ | ___ \ / ____| Ric Hotchkiss IDSA         2000  Eastman  Drive
\____ \| |___) )|  _  /( (____  ric.hotchkiss@sdrc.com        Milford, OH 45150
|_____/|______/ |_| \_\ \_____| Implementation Specialist          513-576-2924

Re: WinNT zsh, minor problems

[Zefram]

ric hotchkiss wrote:
>1. When using the read I get no echo of the characters typed in.
>   Is there a way to get the characters echoed as they are typed?

Under Unix, that's the tty's job, not the shell.  Does NT not have such
a device?

>2. When running awk/gawk double quotes inside a single quoted script get
>removed
>   unless quoted with backslash. I am trying to write code for both WinNT and 
>   UNIX, \" does not work on UNIX and " does not work for WinNT.

Unless the zsh port in question has been modified to do this, it seems
most likely that it is the command in question, rather than zsh, that is
fiddling with the quoting.  I'm not familiar with NT, but I do know that
under DOS and Win95 it is up to each program to handle quoting of its
own arguments.  Throwing a Unix-convention program into that environment
is unsurprisingly problematic.  If this is the case then the execve()
syscall should be modified to add quoting.

-zefram