Date: Wed, 12 Oct 1994 14:04:08 -0700 (PDT)
From: Gordon Hogenson <ghogenso AT u DOT washington DOT edu>
Subject: Definitive GNU fileutils ports
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu


I have a few questions about DJGPP ports of the GNU fileutils,
e.g. cp, mv, rm, touch, etc.

1. I know ports exist, but have the patches for MSDOS/DJGPP been
   contributed to the FSF?  Are these patches now part of the
   standard distribution fileutils-x.x.tar.gz ?

2. If not, what different ports of the fileutils exist, 
   where can they be obtained, and what differences are there
   among them?  I recall a debate about using O_TEXT or
   O_BINARY for the fileutils.  If there are multiple ports
   with different behavior in this regard, can someone describe
   (in objective terms) the differences in behavior, so that I may
   decide (based on my needs) what to get.

3. Comments on the interaction of the fileutils with GO32's command line 
   globbing and with GNU make would also be appreciated, e.g.
   behavior with respect to backslashes, slashes, wildcards,
   drive letters, etc.  Does '*' on the command line match "foo.c" or
   just "foo"?  Does '*.*' match "foo" or just "foo.c"?  What
   does 'e:*\*' mean?  Is the behavior within a GNU makefile
   consistent if the command line is interpreted by the shell first,
   as, for example, if I append "> output" to the command line?
   This was a problem with DJGPP 1.11's make.

4. Any comments on the reliability of various ports would also
   be appreciated... (e.g. how much 'stress testing' they have
   undergone).

I will put together a document summarizing all this information,
which I hope people will find useful.  If you're like me, you
would like to use the fileutils but you don't because you don't
know whether they are reliable, and you're unsure about their
handling of UNIX vs. DOS conventions, and you're especially worried
that the behavior may be sensitive to whether make send the command
line to the shell first or not.

Gordon Hogenson