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SubjectRe: Bash Issues
jmerkey@timpanogas.com (Jeff V. Merkey) writes:

>the three because the default for these shells don't let you use all
>ASCII charaters to make cool little boxes and such without a lot of work
>and research into how shells work.

Jeff,

once again: The shell only runs your program. This means: It loads it
into memory, executes it, passes certain environment variables and
parameters to it and tries to give it a certain defined state of the
system devices.

You yourself are responsible for setting up the terminal. Once your
program is loaded and running, there is no shell between you and the
terminal. Nothing will magically or evilly translate characters or
keystrokes.

>Again, the point that is missed is that for all you "unix hacker guru
>types" having to do "set meta-on" an such in a /.inputrc file may not be

This is not necessary. I could use the original ksh sources compiled
on Linux for a shell and someone else uses the smsh (that was the
name, wasn't it?) and the program should run fine. IT IS NOT A SHELL
ISSUE.

Even if someone forces his terminal to 7bit ASCII in bash, once your
program is running, you're welcome to set the terminal to 8bit mode.

_BUT YOU MUST NOT ASSUME THAT ANYTHING ABOVE 0x7f IS STANDARDIZED.
And you should leave the terminal in a sane state once you leave the
program.

Just cat a binary to the screen. Total garbage. But not the shells'
fault. It's the fault of the "cat" program which messed up the
terminal.

I could have not a single font with the IBM line drawing characters
installed on my system. What would you do? Materialize these? I want
my ä, my ö and my ß as I am a german and I'm pretty sure that all the
french people will be pissed off if they have to swap their accented
characters for line drawing characters.

As some people pointed out, Unicode would be a way to go, but if I'm
correct, the Unicode support on the console and in X really depends on
the availability of fonts.

In the Unix world, things are not that easy as on PC/DOS/Windows, just
because of the large variety of hardware, drivers, consoles and
terminals (on my normal Linux box I need at least three styles of
terminals: xterms, vt102 for a serial terminal and linux. They're
_almost_ the same but the "almost" is where the fun is.

But you get big rewards: Running your programs with remote displays on
a vast variety of hardware is something no DOS/Windows/Netware has yet
managed really good.

> a big deal, but end user customers are lazy and don't want to do a
> weeks worth of research just to get their displays to look like what
> they are used to with NetWare, DOS, NT, Windows 95/98, etc. I know
> you guys

There is a simple answer: This is not possible. If I actively remove
all fonts with IBM line drawing characters from my system, you're
stuck. BTW: Do your utilities run correct on the mentioned Win98?

> think I'm anal here or something, but I am trying to make this easy
> for our folks who will buy a Caldera or RedHat commercial Linux and
> the stuff just works without the user needing to do all this extra
> stuff to get what they can get "free and easy" from Microsoft and
> Novell (like simple text graphics support for utilities).

Once your stuff is stable, I want the NWFS on my Sparc Enterprise
server. That is the whole point of writing software for Linux. Not
just focusing on the Intel/PC-architecture/PCI-based Computer but on a
hardware independed platform.

I do appreciate your big efforts with the Netware FS. But many of your
attitudes from the PC world simply do not translate very well to the
Unix world. You simply cannot assume "I have a font with such
characters at this position, so let's output this hexcode and be done
with it".

The Unix way of abstracting hardware depended issues gave us Linux
systems that boot with a braille console.

If you use the correct procedures as pointed out by Alan and others,
and then backtranslate this to your Windows code, I'm pretty sure that
you will get more stable Windows applications.


Regards
Henning

--
Dipl.-Inf. (Univ.) Henning P. Schmiedehausen -- hps@tanstaafl.de
TANSTAAFL! Consulting - Unix, Internet, Security

Hutweide 15 Fon.: 09131 / 50654-0 "There ain't no such
D-91054 Buckenhof Fax.: 09131 / 50654-20 thing as a free Linux"

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