On Fri, 9 Jun 2000, Simon Burge wrote:

: It seems that way.  I've been quite surprised by the support this
: this, and not even a private flame either!

Well, that's a first.  I got flames back when I started down this road....

: At the moment, I have (broken up a little so the letters line up):
: 
: 	GETOPTSTR	"a cC e g   hjKlLM:mN:  O:o:p: r STt:U:u vW:w x"
: 	SYSVGETOPTSTR	"aA  defg:G: j lL     n:  o:p:P s  t:U:u:     y"
: 
: so the presence of -'AdfGnP' would automatically switch to SysV mode.

The letters may line up, but those that do are not the same between the
modes!  For instance, "-e" means something very different to each.

I'm ... not convinced that this can be done properly through flags.  Ultrix 
tried it, and came up with a bastard child that didn't work quite like
either (and you "forced" BSD mode by *omitting the option dash*).

I'll resuggest my original suggestion along these lines:  to introduce
/usr/5bin (a la SunOS 4).  This would have several benefits:

- selection of SysV vs. BSD semantics of a command through $PATH;

- no "select via __progname"--just separate programs, that could be in a
separate install set/pkg;

- the ability to symlink /emul/svr4/usr/bin/ps to /usr/5bin/ps and get
something that will make SVR4 scripts happy when runningin a SVR4 shell.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (tv@pobox.com)