Re: [MacPerl] UNIX "system" command

["Darin S. Morley" <morley_darin@bah.com>]

My spies tell me that one "Vicki Brown" wrote:

>I guess I'm wondering about other folks on this list.  Do those of you who
>spend most of your time on the Mac find yourselves not even thinking about
>things like system() and "open ...|" ?

i used to be a big fan of back ticks, you know like:

   foreach $thingy (`dir /this/and/that`) {
   }

but i now use the built in stuff. i like it a lot better. i learned perl 
on unix, so occassionally i miss a thing or two. for instance, 
multi-threading--i pegged all the cpus on a 12 cpu Onyx with some 
multi-threaded stuff. there's something really satisfying about that. 
most of the things that i miss about unix, i figure will show up in 
Rhapsody. i can't tell you how important i think it is that Rhapsody ship 
with Perl. (it should also ship with a C compiler (even if it's gcc) so 
that i can download and compile new versions of Perl.) your assignment is 
to make certain that happens :-)

>How many of us work on UNIX and
>Mac?  Do the Mac's limitations (I work at Apple; I can call them
>limitations :-) affect your Perl coding style?

i'm currently working on some Perl code that will run on Unix boxes. i'm 
basically implementing a communications protocol. i'm testing it now 
using UDP socket connections. i didn't think that that would work on a 
Mac, but i figured i'd give it a try. i was pleasantly surprised when it 
did. unfortunately, the target communications mechanism is a TCIM 
(basically, a SCSI modem). using streams on the Unix box i should be able 
to open /dev/something.or.other and read and write to the TCIM (the 
software that came with the TCIM isn't working yet, cross your 
fingers--this all has to work by monday :-). i guess my point is that i 
rather like named pipes (like: /dev/tty or whatever).

so that's my $.02 and you have a nice day :-)

--
Darin S. Morley                                        Phone: 703.908.4436
Booz, Allen & Hamilton                                   Fax: 703.908.4344
morley_darin@bah.com                                       morleyd@acm.org