clock and echo problems

[Mike Stefanik/78125]

In article <1991Jan3.061037.26249 at sceard.Sceard.COM> mrm at Sceard.COM (M.R.Murphy) writes:
>I'm sorry I wasn't clear in my original posting regarding /bin/echo. I know
>that csh has echo builtin (as does ksh with echo aliased to print - :-), and
>I know that /bin/sh uses /bin/echo rather than a builtin echo. What I wanna 
>know is how come
> /bin/echo --
>doesn't work. Echo -- works with the builtin echo of csh and ksh. BTW,
>/bin/echo -- works on all the non-Xenix implementations of Unix(tm) that I
>bothered to seek out. Maybe it's because the Xenix /bin/echo uses getopt,
>but it really shouldn't :-)

You seem to be correct about /bin/echo using the getopt() function; however,
you always could use:

	/bin/echo "\055\055"
:-)

>The clock problem is a real pain. I know about resetting the clock from the
>cmos clock every so often with something run from cron, but that seems so
>gross,so kludged, so pragmatic, and so troubled by the possibility of rerunning
>something that should only be run once a day or once an hour, that I hate to
>do it that way. I'm familiar with the use of locks and one-shots to avoid
>multiple invocations, but I'd still rather have some nice, easy way to tweak
>things to make the software clock more accurate.

I ran into this problem myself at one point in time; I would just have the
following done every 10 minutes by cron:

	date `cat /dev/clock` >/dev/null 2>&1

BTW: /dev/clock reads the CMOS clock.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Stefanik, Systems Engineer (JOAT), Briareus Corporation
UUCP: ...!uunet!bria!mike
"If it was hard to code, it should be harder to use!"