On Thu, 8 Jun 2000, Todd Vierling wrote:

# 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.

Why not just do a force to sysV via -A and leave it at that?

# 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*).

[actually, I was quite fond of that, since I never use the option dashes
 in the first place unless I'm using some of the stuff which needs option
 dashes, but those are after the initial keys, so it doesn't matter.
 Your Mileage Will Vary, I'm sure]

# 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;

Could we not do this?  I always this was a kludge, myself.  Sun's
/bin/sh and /bin/echo looked in $PATH to see which version to use.

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

No argument here, for previously discussed reasons.

# - 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.

Hm.  This might make a compelling argument, except that once you go
to EMUL_SVR4, doesn't everything else after that try to run under the
same emulation?

...or Did I Miss Something Here? [TM]

				--*greywolf;
--
"I didn't get where I am today without using BSD."