Subject: Re: pcvt and TIOCCONS
To: Gordon W. Ross <gwr@mc.com>
From: Chris G Demetriou <Chris_G_Demetriou@ux2.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
List: current-users
Date: 04/19/1996 18:00:56
> I'm coming to like the idea of a single file where the 2nd field
> is a "match criteria" just like the first field (tty_name).  I'm
> not as comfortable with the idea of a long list of "action verbs"
> being supported in the 2nd field.  That sounds like bloat to me.
> (Trying to make this into a shell! 8^)

(i'm assuming you're talking about 2nd field as "match criteria.")

Define "supported."  Does that mean "allowed"?  or "used by us"?

If the former, i think you'd need a good reason, if you wanted to
_restrict_ the implementation to allow only a certain set of keywords
to match against.

On the other hand, just because we don't disallow a 'match' field of
'foobar' doesn't mean that we should write code that uses it, either.


> > or even better (with the very simple action wildcarding i proposed
> > earlier):
> > 
> > tty0	*		/somewhere/${ACTION}_frob ${TTY}
> 
> Maybe that should be "any" instead of "*" in case we decide to add
> some kind of globbing or regular expression support later.

Well, if you're talking about glob-like matching (not REs), "*" would
be what you want...  it's not clear to me that the generality of REs
would be appropriate for matching in this case, anyway...

Also, see above about what 'match' fields we define, etc...  'any' is
just a special case of 'foobar.'  8-)


cgd