v10i053: MSDOS Shell (sh) Implementation - Part 00 of 05

[Ian Stewartson]

Posting-number: Volume 10, Issue 53
Submitted-by: istewart at datlog.co.uk (Ian Stewartson)
Archive-name: sh_dos/part01

Brandon,

This is part 0 of a five part (sh01, sh02, sh03, sh04 and sh05) archive.  It
contains the source for an implementation of the Unix shell under MSDOS.  As
far as possible it is compatible with the System V.3 program sh(1).  The
following differences are noted:

1)  Background or asynchronous commands are not supported

2)  Certain internal commands which have no equivalent MSDOS supported
    functionality support (ulimit, time etc) are not provided.

3)  Command hashing and accounting are not supported.

4)  8 bit character sets are not supported.

The enhancements have been made for the MSDOS environment and these are
described in the Readme in the archive.

Why - well I spent far to much time swapping between the two to have to
think about the shell - so I ported the Minix Shell over Christmas.  I
mailed Charles Forsyth who wrote the original version for minix and he is
happy to allow it to be release (given the copyright notices in the source -
don't remove the copyright or sell it).

We have tested it under MSDOS 3.3 and 4.0 and the DOS box for OS/2.  It
is not designed as a replacement for command.com (since you need command.com
to load your TSRs), just a program you can run at the end of the autoexec.bat
to move you into Unix.  Of course, once you leave the MSDOS world behind
and move into a psuedo Unix world you need your own Unix commands (cat, mkdir,
rmdir etc).  But in the words of at least one Professor of Mathematics - that
it left as a trivial exercise for the reader.

Regards,

Ian Stewartson
Data Logic Ltd, Queens House, Greenhill Way, Harrow, Middlesex, HA1 1YR, UK.
(Phone) +44 1 863 0383 (Telex) 888103 (Fax) +44 1 861 2010
	+44 81 863 0383 after May 1990.
(Network) istewart at datlog.co.uk or ukc!datlog!istewart