Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 07:35 CST
From: DARREL HANKERSON <HANK AT DUCVAX DOT AUBURN DOT EDU>
Subject: ms_sh200 command lines
To: ericb AT lsid DOT hp DOT com
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu

I have cc'd to the djgpp-mailing list only because this started there (and
ms_sh may be of use to anyone porting UNIX tools).

I had stated earlier that I ms_sh did not use the extend.lst file to 
control the passing of long command-lines. Eric Backus corrected my mistake.

I had received mail from the author of ms_sh, Stewartson, which I believed
confirmed my tests, but it appears that Stewartson and I were misunderstanding
eachother.

To make a long story short, ms_sh will use the @filename-convention, but only
if the command-line is sufficiently long. My earlier confusion was due
to the combination of this and the problems getting ms_sh to pass quoted
command lines (these are common if you use gawk).

Mr Backus replied:

 I have never been able to get this [quoted command lines] to work, 
 regardless of the type of
 quote mark.  This is my biggest complaint with MS_SH200, since this
 breaks many simple scripts and Makefiles from unix.

It does work to turn these lines into something like 
  gawk -f file.awk ...
but it would be nice if it worked directly. Rommel suggested trying different
quote-chars, but I have never been able to get it to work (not even with
the OS/2 alpha release of ksh).

Thanks to Eric Backus and others for the replies. Someone mentioned again
the MKS tookkit. Perhaps that version of sh will work. Many have said that
the toolkit is worth the money.

--Darrel Hankerson hank AT ducvax DOT auburn DOT edu