Date:	Tue, 21 Jun 94 11:37:32 JST
From:	Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
To:	leonardr AT eeng DOT dcu DOT ie
Cc:	Djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject:	make ALL?

Roy and DJGPPers:

Roy (leonardr AT eeng DOT dcu DOT ie (Roy Leonard)) said

Roy> A Copy of Xargs & Touch for Dos, can be found at the following 
Roy> site.  They seem to work fairly well.  

Roy> One port is by Eric Backus, which is available at 

Roy> ftp://ftp.math.niu.edu/pub/djgpp.stuff/packages
+----------------------
| Roy> , or some similar path at that machine.  You need a ZOO archive 
| Roy> extracter, also available there.  Some of Eric's ports have 
| Roy> some problems with io redirections (cat in particular does, 
| Roy> I don't know about any others).
|
| Roy> There are also the GNUish ports, available at Simtel mirrors in
| Roy> ..../msdos/gnuish and at garbo.uwasa.fi, I forget exactly where.  Garbo
| Roy> is the primary upload site for GNUish ports.
+--------------------->

This last was an unattributed quote from a post of mine, and was
corrected by Eric.  Eric's ports have one problem in the program 'cat'
with redirecting standard input.  For some reason that has to do with
MS-DOS's treatment of stdin and stdout not being the same as the
treatment of files in the IO libraries, redirected stdin gets confused
with stdout and you get a message that cat can't overwrite the input
with its output.  This causes a problem in many FSF makefiles, which
use the form 'echo "variables" | cat' and similar things a lot.  Other
than this, Eric's ports have no known problems with redirection.
    It's bad enough that this was unattributed and contains incorrect
information that was later corrected by the author of the software.
What's worse is that it's totally unrelated to 'touch', where I can
imagine no conceivable use for IO redirection.  Not sure what 'xargs'
does, maybe it's relevant there.
    Hanging my head in shame because Eric had told me that he knew
what the bug probably was and that it probably was localized to 'cat'
but I was too lazy to dig up the correspondence when I made the
erroneous post:

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                           Stephen Turnbull                            |
|     University of Tsukuba, Institute of Socio-Economic Planning       |
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|                                                                       |
|                Founder and CEO, Skinny Boy Associates                 |
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