Roland Mainz writes: > No, we don't deliver "open"/"close"/"poll"/"stat"/"readlink"/etc. > because these and many other builtins were removed from PSARC 2006/550 > because I tried to be "nice" and avoid another large chunk of work for > the initial ARC case (we already had enougth controversial items like > libcmd and the 64bit stuff in that case and more items like bindings for > /usr/xpg6/bin/ or a fight for "open"/"close"/"poll"/"stat"/etc. looked > like "too much"...). Problem is now that my attempt to be friendly now > backfires badly... ;-(
Predicting the future is almost always troublesome. However, I don't think that this is really the wrong result. Providing /usr/bin/readlink means that other shells (such as, say, tcsh) immediately get the benefit of having that command available. It means that Solaris is one notch more friendly for refugees from Linux. In the case of ksh93, and unless I misunderstand the issue, what you're talking about is _only_ a performance tweak in ksh93 -- using built-ins in more cases where it's possible. For those other shells, it's a matter of simple usability and functionality. I don't see that as being a bad tradeoff at all. Not good if all you care about is microscopic performance of ksh93 scripts, but good for just about everyone else. (Really, if the performance of /usr/bin/readlink is a serious issue for someone, rather than the performance of some big application like Apache or Oracle, then I'd be pretty surprised.) -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
