Porting UNIX Applications to the Mac

[Mike Shaddock]

In article <1091 at hoptoad.uucp> tim at hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>This issue is going to become more and more important as the UNIX Mac is
>released.  Apple has committed themselves to preserving the Mac interface
>while also supporting UNIX(tm).  But my gremlins (actually, experience with
>
> [lots more good information here, but trimmed for brevity ].

Tim brings up good points on the problems of i/o re-direction on the
Mac.  It seems to me that most logical place to do this would be in
the stdio routines.  If we could change the stdio routines to do our
type checking, simply recompiling the program on the Mac would get it
running.  I may be missing the point, but it sounds like there are two
problems, one involving putting a Mac interface on grep (for example),
and one to do the actual i/o stuff.  As far as putting a Mac interface
on the program, I think that it would not be very hard to do for most
programs.  A subroutine at the beginning of the program which handles
the window stuff to set up the parameters, files, regexp's, etc., then
you pick something to start the program to actually "run" (for grep,
to start searching).  Two other things bother me, though.  One, how do
we tell a program to redirect its i/o in the first place, and two, how
do we handle all of the many different programs from Unix(tm)?  I
suppose that we could have some sort of menu that says "I want to run
some programs piped together", and then pick the programs in the
appropriate order, or we could do what was done for the Amiga in the
CLI interface (i.e. have something like a shell window where you use
the standard Unix syntax), and then let each program pop up a window
for it use.  For the second problem, Unix(tm) has the "path" concept,
but how do we do this on a Mac?  We don't want to have lots and lots
of program icons littering the desktop, and we really don't want to
have extremely long menus of commands.  Does this sound like a valid
problem, or am I just confused?
-- 
Mike Shaddock	{decvax,seismo,ihnp4akgua,philabs}!mcnc!rti-sel!shaddock

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