From: pjfarley AT dorsai DOT org (Peter J. Farley III) Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Why not fork() etc. specific for for shell usage? Date: Fri, 06 Jun 1997 03:47:12 GMT Organization: The Dorsai Embassy, Inc. Lines: 32 Message-ID: <339787eb.2387875@news.dorsai.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: pjfarley.ppp1.dorsai.org To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Precedence: bulk I'm definitely *not* trying to start a flame here, but I felt this was one of those "obvious" things I should point out, in case no one else saw it before. Please be gentle with me if I've stepped into it without realizing how deep it was.... I have been perusing the mail archive, and while I see many discussions of multitasking/multiprocessing and the limitations of the DOS environment, I did not see this side of the issue addressed: Why can't DJGPP implement sufficient tasking to just support shell pipes and redirection, which only involve standard I/O, and synchronous subshells for () and `` operations? IOW, there would be no need to support message passing, named pipes, etc. (the hard stuff). Asynchronous process support would not be needed, since most shell scripts don't need or use it. At the very least, this would make *building* unix-based software more standard in the DJGPP environment, IMHO. No, it would not support true "background" processing. And no, it would not support realistic *user* process programming, but that's the *hard* part, and we need to keep looking for solutions to that one. It *would* help solve some of the problems we encounter *building* other folk's software for our environment, I think, and that can only help by giving us more time to work on the really hard parts, and less time tweaking unix-based scripts to accomodate the deficiencies in DOS. Comments appreciated, even if they're only to point out the errant folly of my thinking, or lack thereof. ---------------------------------------------------- Peter J. Farley III (pjfarley AT dorsai DOT org)