Ron
I never understood why sendmail needed it. [Actually I never really
understand sendmail's need but that's another discussion and discussion
I've had with Ertc over the years]. But shell escape were pretty typical,
until Kulp's ^Z job control stuff and/or real window managers - it would
have sucked not to have had them.
Off the top of my head:
- any editor (text or graphical)
- things that controlled the screen like more(1) would have wanted to
support something like this
- programs that produced graphical output -- from *roff/tex and the
like, to many/most of the CAD programs, or even Ghostscript I think. You
might want to dump out and suck back in something processed from another
program, and the 'pipeline' was not always the easy/right way to do that.
Classic example of calling on the PS/EPS tools from inside of troff. This
is why tools like xdvi and the like supported it.
- long-running games where you did not want to lose your session
- many things that supported remote job entry/execution - which was
really common in the old days [hence UUCP, the PWB RJE tools, rsh and the
like]. IICR there was a couple of versions of telnet/supdup that could do
it.
Clem
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On Tue, Aug 1, 2023 at 1:48 AM ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I got to wondering, based on the sendmail discussions,
how many shell
escapes have appeared over the years?
uucp
sendmail
xdvi : "The "allowShell" option enables the shell escape in PostScript
specials"
There must be a lot of them, however.