On Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:42:24 +0100 I. Szczesniak wrote: > On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 11:42 PM, Wendy Lin <[email protected]> wrote: > > I have a long standing feature request: Can the AST grep cmd be moved > > into libcmd to make it a shell built in, please? Many platforms lack > > suitable or standard (i.e. POSIX, like SunOS or AIX /bin/grep) > > conforming grep implementations and a fast, conforming and > > *accessible* grep implementation within ksh93 would be a *great* plus. > > > > Thanks for the consideration.
> +1 > I agree that this would be very useful. The opensolaris illumos ksh93 > already has AST grep as standard builtin, bound to /usr/xpg4/bin/grep, > but to my surprise the standard ast-open distro does not. > Glenn, Roland, Olga, can you elaborate? writing a builtin requires more coding discipline than standalone commands the upside for this is that ksh93 already uses most of the -last parts that grep does we just have to make sure that grep plays nice with * memory * file descriptors * checking ksh callback for interrupts the last one is important for possibly long running builtins they must periodically call a ksh callback function to check for early termination a standalone implementation could just call exit(1) or let the signal default terminate a builtin inner loop is usually in the deepest part of the code so early termination requires a meticulous unwind to the top the upside is we think we have all that taken care of before we add it to -lcmd I think we could use some testing in the wild I'll see about posting a small package that has the grep family as a ksh plugin/builtin that way we can beta test builtin grep without affecting the main distribution I think there was also request for builtin xargs, that can go in there too _______________________________________________ ast-users mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.research.att.com/mailman/listinfo/ast-users
