Well, the good news is, lua looks better and better the more I look at it. Lua with luasocket, lualibs, luamd5, etc. can probably replace netcat and a few other things, maybe even snarf with upload, and will undoubtedly be better in general. I'm working on butchering the reference manual down to size. I'm writing a getopts, and converting the awks in buildit.s to lua was easy. The bad news is, rewriting 'cut' and 'grep' and 'split' and 'wc' and 'tee' and 'head' and 'dirname' and 'undeb--' and 'unrpm--' from awk to lua is going to be a fair amount of work. In addition, there is figuring out what it will take to replace snarf and nc and maybe some others... I'm open to anyone who has some free time and would find rewriting shellutils and textutils in lua interesting... buildit.s requires that at least 'cut' and 'wc' work. I might just make minimally functional ones just for buildit.s and put it together without the ones that aren't written, to get a proof of concept going, and probably at first I won't have the extra libraries like the socket stuff. I have the basic Lua with basic, math, io, and string libraries down to 72K, 15K less than mawk. If you want to work on any of the utilities, let me know and I'll send a copy of getopts in whatever stage I have it in by then... Again, go to www.lua.org to see it. -Tom
