Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!gatech!mcnc!rti!sas!bts
From: bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Yea, but can an Amiga Shell do this....
Keywords: my favorite unix command
Message-ID: <597@sas.UUCP>
Date: 10 Aug 88 17:36:32 GMT
References: <2213@ihlpm.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger)
Organization: SAS Institute Inc, Cary NC
Lines: 49

In article <2213@ihlpm.ATT.COM> jmdavis@ihlpm.ATT.COM (Davis) writes:
|
|After hearing the talk of AmigaShell and other related things.
|I am wondering if any of these shells can execute my favorite
|unix KSH command, namely the backtick.

Well, I don't know if any of them have this built in, but I wrote an ARexx
function (which I called bquote, but you could call whatever you want) to
do just this.  With the WShell and ARP, you can do things like:

    2> "join backq(grep -l FOOSTR *) > FOOSTR_files"

(Providing, that is, that you have something like grep available.)

Actually, I wrote it as a subfunction while writing FOREACH, which is used
as follows:

    foreach fn (*.c)
        print $fn
    end

(just like in csh) or, to be more consise,

    foreach (*.c) print

(I just wish I could do *that* in csh!  Oh, well, csh is pretty primitive 
compared to WShell/ARexx . . . I'm sure we'll get 4.3 at work someday and
then I can see if ksh is up to the standards of my Amiga software . . . )

Note that WShell and ARexx know nothing in particular about Unix (ARexx is 
from the IBM mainframe world originally), but ARexx is so powerful that in
my very first evening with it I was able to write both of the above-mentioned
little functions.

SO anyway, the answer is: WShell+ARexx (+ARP+conman, but they come with 
WSHell so they don't count when ordering) is so flexible and powerful that
it can probably be made to do anything your favorite system at work does
without too much trouble, and they are certainly up to  the functionality of
the csh `backquote`.


BTW, if people are interested I can post the relavent programs.  Actually, I'd
go ahead and do it now, but I don't happen to be at home at the moment, so
I can't . . .
-- 
--Brian,                     __________________________________________________
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