Access to UNIX-Related Standards

[Moderator, John Quarterman]

From: pyramid!amdahl!amdcad!qubix!wjvax!brett (Brett Galloway)
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 86 09:39:13 pdt
Organization: Watkins-Johnson Co., San Jose, Calif.

In article <5968 at ut-sally.UUCP> Hal Jespersen writes:
>
>The IEEE P1003.2 "Shell and Utilities" Working Group is developing a
>proposed standard to complement the 1003.1 POSIX standard.  It will
>consist of
>...
>	programmatic interfaces to the shell (system(), popen()) and
>	related facilities (regular expressions, file name expansion,
>	etc.)
>...

I think that it would be great to standardize the command set available -- this
would make writing makefiles and command servers (shell escapes) under other
applications much more portable.  One feature that I would like to see is an
alternative interface to system().  System() is great unless the user is doing
his own child process management.  In that case, he would like to do the fork()
and exec() himself and not let system() do it for him.  The alternative
interface should be some new variant of exec() (like execvp()) which sets up
the call to the appropriate command processor.

-------------
Brett Galloway
{pesnta,twg,ios,qubix,turtlevax,tymix,vecpyr,certes,isi}!wjvax!brett

Volume-Number: Volume 7, Number 59