On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 06:00:38PM +0200, Akim Demaille wrote: : >>>>> "Gary" == Gary V Vaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: : Gary> As far as shell functions are concerned, it seems to me that : Gary> m4sh could provide shell function wrapper macros which expand to : Gary> a function/function call if that is supported by the shell, or : Gary> else an inline function if not... : : Something which creates satellites executables (small sh scripts : instead of functions) when functions are not supported? I often : thought about that.
I've had this idea too, but haven't investigated how exactly it should be done. Would you put the function implementation into a string variable and then either dump the variable to a script file or if functions are supported envelope it and do 'eval' to get it registered in the shell? Can here-docs be used to get around string variable quoting inconveniences? All the small sattelite script would have to be quite a slow-down on systems without functions - but we won't really know before we've tried though. Maybe my projects' configure scripts can shrink from 500K down to, say 100K :) Nah, I'm dreaming ;) Lars J
