Baslinux mailing list

[Lee Forrest <lforrestster AT gmail.com>]

On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 07:42:57AM +1300, 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:
> Lee Forrest wrote:
> >
> > I'd like to suggest that you leave sed out of the BL4 version of
> > busybox and include a full-featured POSIX sed for BL. Wouldn't
> > have to be GNU sed.
> > 
> > Sed is a marvelous tool and it shouldn't have its wings clipped.
> 
> What's bothering you about sed in the current busybox?

I get "Segmentation Fault" on some of the more useful sed1liners.
And the author of that document is careful to allow for the
capabilities of various versions of sed.

This probably has something to do with buffer limitations found
in some seds.

> It appears that there have been some fixes to sed in
> busybox 1.2.2 (which I am testing at the moment), but 
> I don't know if that's going to address your sed issue.
> 
> If the busybox sed does not meet your needs, I suggest
> you install sed from Slackware 4.0.

I'm thinking about scripting, Steven. I can't script for utilities
that other BL users don't have.

> > You could easily leave out head and cut and grep and 
> > wc and tail
> 
> That's not going to happen.

You are a cut expert. I always use sed instead.

> > all of those things can easily be done with simple 
> > scripts, many of them requiring a full-featured sed. 
> > The scripts would be named after the utilities they 
> > replaced.
> 
> There was a mini-distro a few years ago (muLinux, I 
> think it was)

I looked into that at one point.

> that used scripts to replace many of 
> the standard utilities.  They worked fine for simple,  
> direct invocations; but they failed badly when they
> were used in complex/compound/piped statements.

That's a challenge, all right, but it is also a fact that the
limitations of many of the busybox versions are enough to drive
someone used to the standard (not necessarily GNU) utilities
right up the wall.

Find, in particular, is a critical system administration tool
in the absence of locate/updatedb.

> > I'll write what needs to be written.
> 
> I'd be more interested in scripts that replace non-busybox
> utilities.  The busybox applets are tightly written and
> thoroughly debugged.  I believe in them.

They work at the most basic level, which is enough for most
people, most of the time.

But you'd be surprised at the number of people here who have
installed many of the standard utilities.

>  I don't have the same confidence in the BL3 mail utilities or
> the BL3 mini terminal. And the wp utility is pathetic.

My solution for the mail utilities at this point are fetchmail,
mailx (no MIME), pppd, chat, and msmtp.

(I'm still learning to use mailx and am only using it on my
simple.net address.)

You could use versions of fetchmail and msmtp that are much smaller
if you leave out ssl/tls capabilities, which would be difficult on
today's internet. Anyway, libssl is required for https and ssh...

Lee

-- 
BasicLinux: Small is Beautiful
http://www.basiclinux.com.ru