From owner-freebsd-small Wed Oct 7 05:27:34 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id FAA10218 for freebsd-small-outgoing; Wed, 7 Oct 1998 05:27:34 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from korin.warman.org.pl (korin.nask.waw.pl [148.81.160.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id FAA10207 for ; Wed, 7 Oct 1998 05:27:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from abial@nask.pl) Received: from localhost (abial@localhost) by korin.warman.org.pl (8.9.1/8.8.5) with SMTP id OAA08948; Wed, 7 Oct 1998 14:31:30 +0200 (CEST) X-Authentication-Warning: korin.warman.org.pl: abial owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1998 14:31:29 +0200 (CEST) From: Andrzej Bialecki X-Sender: abial@korin.warman.org.pl To: Andrew Hannam cc: Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai , "Christopher G. Petrilli" , FreeBSD Small Subject: RE: Command-line i/f In-Reply-To: <000101bdf1e4$5e0279e0$0104010a@andrewh.famzon.com.au> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 7 Oct 1998, Andrew Hannam wrote: > With all this discussion on Forth, I ask myself why people are looking for > alternatives to the most common script language/command line (/bin/sh). The > obvious answer is size but yet it was not so long ago that I remember seeing > versions of sh below the 10K mark in size (albiet 16 bit versions). What > happenned ? - Job control, command line completion and all sorts of other > very nice features. > Has anyone looked back into history to find a far more minimal version of > the shell that is more suitable to PicoBSD's requirements ? > Whilst writing 32 bit code may cause larger binaries - we have the > advantages of shared libraries to help reduce it again. > Anyone know of such an implementation with appropriate source licenses? Yes. If I have enough time, I may perhaps even today add a link to it on picobsd home page. I took it from Minix distribution. It does most things the /bin/sh does (though I haven't tested it thoroughly yet), and it's small (ca. 40kB). The most obvious deficiency is lack of support for user-defined functions, and this is a serious one. I plan also to port an editor from Minix - it comes out slightly smaller than our ee. Andrzej Bialecki -------------------- ++-------++ ------------------------------------- ||PicoBSD|| FreeBSD in your pocket? Go and see: Research & Academic |+-------+| "Small & Embedded FreeBSD" Network in Poland | |TT~~~| | http://www.freebsd.org/~picobsd/ -------------------- ~-+==---+-+ ------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message