1 Jan
2023
1 Jan
'23
4:44 p.m.
Chet Ramey <chet.ramey(a)case.edu> wrote:
On 12/30/22 1:25 PM, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
Sorry to say, it wasn't me. Geoff Collyer made the v9 sh portable
and it's available from his web site.
I did do stuff with the shell back in the 80s:
- I back-ported Ron Natalie's job control into the 4.2 BSD sh,
along with a history mechanism I wrote from scratch that was
inspired by csh. I posted the diffs in comp.sources.unix.
- A few very minor features were added to ksh at my suggestion.
ISTR that one was `set -A array-name value ...' but I don't see that
in current ksh93 doc.
- I was a reviewer for both editions of David Korn's book on ksh.
- I contributed to pdksh, although I don't remember what. The pdksh
doc lists my name though.
- In the early 90s I did a little banging on the vi mode in the
readline librar so that bash's vi mode would be closer to what
I'd been used to in ksh.
In the late 80s I got interested in awk and moved almost all my
personal scripting to awk, although I still do shell work at $DAYJOB
or for personal use as needed.
Arnold
London and Reiser report about porting the shell that “it required by
far the largest conversion effort of any supposedly portable program,
for the simple reason that it is not portable.” By the time of SysIII
this is greatly improved, but also in porting the SysIII user land it
was the most complex of the set so far.
Have you read
http://www.collyer.net/who/geoff/sh.tour.pdf
and looked at http://www.collyer.net/who/geoff/v7sh.tar ?
In the limited literature on Bourne Shell porting, this is authoritative.
Arnold Robbins built on that work and ported the v8-v10 shells to modern
Linux versions. (I am sorry, I do not have a link right now.)