Date: Thu, 13 Oct 94 11:06:23 -0400
From: dj AT stealth DOT ctron DOT com (DJ Delorie)
To: ghogenso AT u DOT washington DOT edu
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: Definitive GNU fileutils ports

> 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 ?

Not yet.  I ported a lot of stuff for the upcoming GNU binary cd-rom,
but haven't submitted diffs yet.  Thanks for reminding me.

> 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.

I had to add options to some commands to deal with text vs binary.

> 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.

globbing is unix-ish, with "*.*" matching only files with extensions
and "*" matching everything.  "\" is a directory separator except when
before whitespace or quotes; use quotes to quote wildcards.

Make might do different things at different times; this has been a
thorn in djgpp for a while.  I suspect that V2.0 will fix it, but I
don't know if/when 1.X will.

DJ