[4996] in SIPB bug reports
Re: mosaic outputs cruft to stdout
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (yandros@MIT.EDU)
Fri Oct 28 04:12:07 1994
From: yandros@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 1994 04:11:48 +0500
To: jhawk@MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-outland@MIT.EDU, bug-sipb@MIT.EDU, eichin@MIT.EDU, yoav@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <9410280141.AA15687@yaz-pistachio.MIT.EDU> (jhawk@MIT.EDU)
Aside from actually using fmt, which is questionable (:-0)
It uses fmt because I want it to use fmt. To quote the rules for
`Outburst':
``You no make-a da game, you no make-a da rules.''
and
using a here document where an echo would suffice (one-line comment),
It hasn't always been one line. It has to run a command anyway, so it
might as well be fmt so it has a chance of doing something intelligent
if it does happen to be longer than one line on a narrow terminal.
and resorting to an ``if;then fi'' construct which seems to be right
inefficient under Ultrix,
Excuse me? How exactly am I supposed to check the terminal type
otherwise?
[well, perhaps, I'm overdoing it?]
You're underdoing, I think. Anagram that sentence. :-)
1) Yoav should consider including a ``sleep 2'' in his mosaic
script, and perhaps using ``nice'' on ``Mosaic''. I must admit
to being rather perplexed as to why there's a sleep 2 in the lynx
script...
It does a sleep so the user can actually read the message, as Eric
surmised.
2) The lynx script shouldn't use:
exec /afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/outland/decmipsbin/lynx.real $@
because this does the wrong thing when you do a
lynx a b "c d" e
(it loses track of the fact that word 3 is c\ d and not just c).
Instead it should be:
This is one of the many deficiencies of sh. You CAN NOT do what you
suggested, because it breaks some programs (a lot more than I think
you realize. Try it.).
exec /afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/outland/decmipsbin/lynx.real "$@"
which solves this problem quite well (and is the standard solution).
Read above. Quoting $@ like that does NOT do the same thing as simply
calling it directly with the arguments seperated by spaces. I can
dig around for a test case for you if you like...
(even since someone
started installing untested binaries into the sipb locker. Grumble.),
I'll look at it this weekend.
Grumble, grumble.
This includes untested scripts. If someone installs a script that
uses exec foo "$@" and it breaks, I will be most unhappy.
chad
