Xref: utzoo comp.os.misc:349 comp.unix.wizards:5791 Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!oberon!skat.usc.edu!blarson From: blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson) Newsgroups: comp.os.misc,comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Command interfaces Message-ID: <5754@oberon.USC.EDU> Date: 16 Dec 87 08:09:36 GMT References: <1257@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <6840002@hpcllmv.HP.COM> <9555@mimsy.UUCP> <798@rocky.STANFORD.EDU> <432@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> <3161@psuvax1.psu.edu> <5565@oberon.USC.EDU> <142@piring.cwi.nl> Sender: news@oberon.USC.EDU Reply-To: blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson) Organization: USC AIS, Los Angeles Lines: 56 In article <142@piring.cwi.nl> jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen) writes: >Uhm, yes, unfortunately I find the 'feature' quite unusable. >I *never* come up with the correct sequence of == and @@, so I have to type >the command three times before I get it right. (really retype, that is. As with most user interface questions, it is a matter of personal preference and what you are used to. >'History mechanism' is something primos has never heard about). There are at least two command line editors for primos 19.4 and later on the market, two I know of being passed around, and one included with primos 21.0 that works with prior version of primos. (The best of the lot in my opinion - I like emacs.) The only os I know of that has such a wide variety is unix -- but with unix you have to replace your whole shell to switch command line editors. >I definitely prefer >for i in *.[ch]; do > diff old/$i $i >$i.diff >done I never had time to dig to deep into my unix manuals for this. It doen't look any more intuitive to me than the primos example. >And, to continue some gripes on primos wildcards: >- I would expect them to work *always*. I.e. if I do > TYPE @@ > (TYPE is primos echo) I would expect a list of all files, *not* '@@'. Well, fix your expectations. Wildcards should only be expaned where filenames are expected. >- If I want all arguments on one line, and I use [WILD @@.TMP], and the > result doesn't fit in 80 characters, I DO DEFINITELY NOT WANT IT TO TRUNCATE > IT AT EIGHTY CHARS! I lost an important file that way: it was trying A. No standard primos command expects a list of files like this. B. The only limit I know of is 160 characters not 80: it applies to commands directly typed to the command processor (not as a result of function calls like wild) and the commands that get their command line from the ancient rdtk$$ call -- anything writen since 19.4 has no reason to use this and many good reasons not to that I won't list here. (Prime is gradually changing over on their utilites.) C. There is a limit of 1024 characters for command lines after function expantion. If this limit is exceeded, an error message is generated and the command is not executed. Therfore, I conclude that this problem must have been a programmer error: using rdtk$$ to read a command line that should be expected to be long. Bob Larson Arpa: Blarson@Ecla.Usc.Edu blarson@skat.usc.edu Uucp: {sdcrdcf,cit-vax}!oberon!skat!blarson Prime mailing list: info-prime-request%fns1@ecla.usc.edu oberon!fns1!info-prime-request