Date: Thu, 13 Oct 94 16:18:48 CDT
From: mmeyer AT rts DOT dseg DOT ti DOT com (Mark Meyer)
To: eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: Definitive GNU fileutils ports


	First, a brief intro.  I don't really know much about djgpp,
but I grew to hate COMMAND.COM, and wanted a more Unix-like interface.
I recently found the GNUish MS-DOS project and pulled off what they
had.  The software seems pretty nice, but it _is_ old.  There doesn't
seem to have been any activity in that project for a couple of years,
and that's a lotta microseconds!  The mailing lists are comatose, too.
Then I heard there was some discussion over here in djgpp about file
utilities, so I hung around here for a while.  When Eli Zaretskii
posted recently, it brought up some questions I wanted to ask...

>>>>> "EZ" == Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il> writes:
 EZ> There is a port of a (very old) version 1.4 of fileutils to
 EZ> 16-bit Microsoft C compiler, by Thorsten Ohl as part of the
 EZ> GNUish MS-DOS project.

	This is what I have.  Eli, are you using the GNUish sh
(version 1.64) as well?  I've also heard mention on this list of go32.
What's that, and where would I find it?

 EZ> There is also a port of Fileutils 3.2 to DJGPP 1.08 by Eric
 EZ> Backus.  I forgot where I got this one, but I still have the .zoo
 EZ> archive.

	Would it be worth my while to try to get this?

 EZ> Does 4 years of everyday usage qualify as ``stress testing''?
 EZ> Not a single complaint I have to report.

	Well, I have a complaint.  The last time I tried to rm a
number of files (y'know, 'rm sh*.tmp', that sort of thing), I got
bitten by DOS's 127-character command line limit.  (God, what a stupid
limitation.)  The docs for the GNUish sh say that it can be told which
programs can handle the '@' convention for specifying response files
as a way to get around the 127-char limit.  I couldn't tell in the
sources whether rm had this capability.  When I asked on
help-gnu-msdos, all I got was the sound of crickets chirping.  Can any
of y'all tell me if I'm stuck with crippled command lines?

-- 
Mark Meyer                                               | mmeyer AT dseg DOT ti DOT com |
Texas Instruments, Inc.,  Plano, TX                      +--------------------+
Every day, Jerry Junkins is grateful that I don't speak for TI.
                                               "Penfold - bite your OWN nails!"