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- THIS PROGRAM REQUIRES THAT MiNT BE ACTIVE IN ORDER TO RUN.
- If you try to run it without MiNT, you will get funny error messages
- every time you try to run a program. Also note that it requires version 0.6
- or higher of MiNT.
-
- This is a port of bash, the GNU Bourne Again shell, to MiNT. It's essentially
- equivalent to the BSD version, right down to the (useless, on the ST) check
- for new mail. This means, in particular, that the backslash character ('\')
- is special, and must be duplicated to be passed to a program, i.e. type
- 'ls c:\\bin' instead of 'ls c:\bin'. For this reason, it's best used with
- utilities that allow forward slashes to separate directories.
-
- The following ST specific features should be noted:
- (1) Searches for executable programs always consider the current directory
- first; this is a bug that I introduced in order to provide feature (2) easily.
- (2) Executable files with the "usual" extensions need not have those extensions
- added, i.e. if you type 'ls' then bash will look for 'ls', 'ls.ttp', 'ls.prg',
- and 'ls.tos' in that order in each directory on your path.
- (3) The ".bashrc" file is called "bash.rc" on the ST. Similarly, the .profile
- file is called "profile", the ".bash_profile" file is called "bash_pro",
- the ".bash_login" file is called "bash_log", and the ".bash_history" file
- is called "bash_his".
- (4) Only some of the "ulimit" options are supported under MiNT, namely
- the -d (malloc'd memory limit), -m (total memory limit), and -t (cpu
- time limit) options; note also that -d and -m mean slightly different
- things under MiNT than they do under BSD.
- (5) There's a bug (?) in the job control feature such that if you run
- bash from a program that doesn't know about job control, that program
- will be suspended when bash exits. Use "fg" (or whatever) to start
- the program again, or else never leave bash (half :-); I'm sure bash
- could be used as a replacement for the MiNT init.prg).
-
- If you don't know bash already... sorry, but there isn't much in the way
- of docs. Get the source code (see below), and/or a good book on the Unix
- /bin/sh. There is (some) online help; just enter "help" on a line by
- itself. See also the "features" file.
-
- The source code is available from the usual GNU places (prep.ai.mit.edu
- being the "canonical" place). I used bash 1.05 taken from my local Sun
- network; it already had some diffs on it (probably most of the known bug
- fixes), and I used Eric Smith's original diffs as a starting point.
- The diffs included in this distribution are from the patched Sun version,
- so you will NOT need Eric's diffs to re-build this. I re-wrote the Makefile
- virtually from scratch; it's not terribly complete, but it does mean that
- the whole process is totally automatic. It was compiled under the MiNT-gcc
- library version 0.8; getting it to work with another compiler/library
- setup will probably prove impossible. Note also that I have the
- readline/history library installed as a standard library on my machine.
-
- I will attempt to support this, but I don't have much time to do so, and
- I intend abandoning 1.05 and porting 1.07 or higher later this year (91).
-
- Happy bashing!
-
- 'Grave' Dave Gymer | Note that I don't have access to the net during
- dpg@Cs.Nott.AC.UK | vacations, so don't be surprised if you get an
- | automatic message or no response from July to early
- | October. Sorry for any inconvenience.
-