Re: where is this used?

[Richard Coleman <coleman@math.gatech.edu>]

> > The field `other' in the structure `job' appears to
> > only be set in execpline() and never used.  Does anyone
> > know what this is for?
> 
> Once upon a time... when I was fiddling with the execution code I used
> this field. It was used for stopping pipelines with loops (and other
> shell-internal things) at the end. For doing that the current shell
> forked and used the child to represent the end of the pipe. The other
> field of the job representing the stopped child held the job number of
> the `old' job (the one representing the head of the pipe), so that
> both of them could be made runnable.
> 
> Since there have been lots of changes in the execution and signal code
> I no longer know if it is still needed (maybe the fact that it isn't
> used anymore is connected to the fact that several bugs -- like the
> infamous never-^C-less-bug -- have reappeared).

I just went through some of the older distributions looking into this.
It appears the `other' field first appeared in zsh-2.5.02.  But in all
distributions it was only set and never used.  So it's removal is probably
not the cause of our problem with signals.

rc