On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 11:30:10AM -0700, David Bustos wrote:
> Quoth Nicolas Williams on Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 12:52:43PM -0500:
> > My simple proposal would be used as I described:
> >
> > svcprop -m ... | while readprop
> > do
> > ...
> > done
> >
> > where readprop is a shell function like the one I included.
> >
> > Now, that would be trivial to implement. So trivial and so useful that
> > I could do it late next week.
>
> Trivial, perhaps, but it looked pretty complicated and difficult to
Not the shell code, the svcprop mods are trivial.
> maintain to me. Maybe I'm just not in the shell loop. I'm asking about
> your usage. I expect that for properties with multiple values, the most
> common usage will be iterating over the values. But your code seemed to
> create some sort of data structure with the type and all of the values.
That was taking advantage of ksh93's compound variables. I can do
simpler shell functions if you prefer.
> So I'm asking whether your usage is representative or not, and if not,
> whether you could use a solution which addresses the most common usage.
svcprop -m ... | while <function call>
do
...
done
is simple enough, methinks.
> > The down-side is that you need a function like what I showed. It's not
> > a terrible downside, but svcprop could have output modes that are useful
> > without any additional shell functions. I described some possible such
> > output modes in my follow-up to Mike. But these output modes will
> > require a lot more work.
>
> Those output modes seem designed for dumping all of the property groups
> of a service or instance. Somehow, I don't think that would be common.
If I understand your proposal you're suggestion one svcprop invocation
to find how many values for a property, and then a per-value invocation
of svcprop. Sounds rather wasteful (lots of fork/execs), though that
too will do -- but think about how you use that from a shell program and
compare to my usage above.
Nico
--
