A/UX Toolbox Programming (Re: Misc AUX 2.0 Questions)

[Matthias Urlichs]

In comp.unix.aux, article <45352 at apple.Apple.COM>,
  johnston at Apple.COM (Ron Johnston) writes:
< 
< >6. Are any of the AUX manuals absolutely essential - the complete
< >   set is rather expensive.
< 
< 1) User Kit - describes shells, editors, mail, uucp, troff, etc.
< 2) Programmer's Kit - describes C, assembler, linker, libraries, system calls,
<    Mac Toolbox, SCCS, awk, lex, yacc, etc.  Also includes man page hardcopy.
< 3) System Administrator's Kit - describes administration and maintenance
<    stuff like user/group admin, backup/restore, adding peripherals, fsck,
<    configuration tuning, and network, NFS, sendmail, YP, etc.
< 
Unfortunately, all of the above is very uninteresting to someone who already
knows his or her way around a typical Unix system, _except_ for the Mac
toolbox support. This includes stuff like
- that if you call NewWindow, the window record must be located in the MacOS
  application heap and _not_ in your data area
- that the glue routines actually mangle your string into Pascal form
  in-place, call the toolbox, then mangle it back -- deadly if your compiler
  puts string constants in text space
- how to get select() and WaitNextEvent to cooperate
- what AUX_SWITCH does, how to get AUX_FORKEXEC to work without crashing the
  toolbox, how to use AUX_REG_SIGIO, ...
- ...

I'm a bit reluctant to fork over $$s for the whole Programmer's Kit.
(Besides, I hate printed documentation. Why aren't these things in the online
 manuals somewhere?)

-- 
Matthias Urlichs -- urlichs at smurf.sub.org -- urlichs at smurf.ira.uka.de     /(o\
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