Re: es 0.7: ^C at prompt

[Donn Cave <donn@u.washington.edu>]

>|PS.  Are there any plans to make it possible to get at the ~user mechanism in
>|some way?  I have a machine that many people don't have logins on but that has
>|access to their home directories via amd/NFS.  Thus a passwd file mechanism
>|doesn't work for most people in the dept.  I'd like to (say) be able to define
>|a function that gets called when doing ~ expansion.

> Amd supports a home directory map, independent of the passwd file.
> /u/schwartz then points to /home/groucho/schwartz, or whatever.  This
> is a thing that goes so nicely in the OS, it's a shame to force it on
> the shell, especially since other programs often want the short name
> for users' homes.

I wonder how it manages to be independent of the passwd file?  It sounds
like a great idea, if that's true.  Unfortunately, I don't know what Amd
is, but on one of our systems, the one where I want to use es in a big
way, we expect to have around 10K users in the very near future, and a
lot more possibly later.  A 10K file directory is going to be a darn slow
way to look things up.

On the other hand, I guess it's not a tremendously big deal for me -
the number of times I have needed to know ~joe in a script has been
quite minimal.  Interactively would be a little different, but then
I can't see people deserting the job control shells for things like
rc or es.

	Donn Cave, University Computing Services, University of Washington
	donn@cac.washington.edu