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Date:      Wed, 7 Oct 1998 14:31:29 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Andrzej Bialecki <abial@nask.pl>
To:        Andrew Hannam <hannama@fan.net.au>
Cc:        Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl>, "Christopher G. Petrilli" <petrilli@amber.org>, FreeBSD Small <freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   RE: Command-line i/f
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.02A.9810071427230.27871-100000@korin.warman.org.pl>
In-Reply-To: <000101bdf1e4$5e0279e0$0104010a@andrewh.famzon.com.au>

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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

--------------------   ++-------++  -------------------------------------
 <abial@nask.pl>       ||PicoBSD||   FreeBSD in your pocket? Go and see:
 Research & Academic   |+-------+|       "Small & Embedded FreeBSD"
 Network in Poland     | |TT~~~| |    http://www.freebsd.org/~picobsd/
--------------------   ~-+==---+-+  -------------------------------------


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