Moinak Ghosh wrote:
Frank Van Der Linden wrote:
Moinak Ghosh wrote:
Nexenta has a very nice approach to this problem. You can set an
environment variable to control your userland environment
personality.
I believe they have hooks into exec to determine the personality of
the caller and automatically resolve binaries from /usr/sun if
SUN_PERSONALITY == 1.
Avoids having to fiddle around with your PATH. It is per-process
so you can execute a command that expects a Solaris compatible env
just by setting this variable from a GNU env thusly:
SUN_PERSONALITY=1 <cmd>.
That sounds like a better approach, although the problem with that
kind of magic is that it's not transparent. I wonder, for example,
how that would work with something like the internal executable path
table that *csh has. Or with commands such as 'which' and 'type'.
It is in fact completely transparent since the path translation
happens in the
kernel side of the the exec syscall.
I have seen something similar used in the past to get around CPU
instruction set differences. On Sony's (Yes Sony) version of BSD
(possibly others), they were able to use an environment variable within
a symbolic link. It actually worked really well. There have been many
times since when I could have used it on other versions of Unix.
Doug
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