-=> Maurice Kinal wrote to Tony Langdon <=-

 MK> Sorry about this weird reply but the message I am replying to never
 MK> made it here.

No probs, weird. :)

 TL> Hmm, what exactly are you trying to do?

 MK> It started out as a simple message tosser way back when as there wasn't
 MK> anything suitable for a single user on linux not unlike an offline
 MK> thingy but much leaner.

I see. :)

 TL> Yeah that really breaks a lot of things.

 MK> It didn't break anything here but definetly is annoying.  I can
 MK> certainly live without it.

Yes, very annoying, and it does break some systems that try to group messages
by subject.

 TL> Bluewave doors suffered Y2K problems, though the Borland libraries
 TL> within them could be patched to fix them.

 MK> Not having a BBS at this end, nevermind doors, effectively solved that
 MK> issue here.  Mind you no Borland libraries either so that was never an
 MK> issue. Thankfully nothing I was using pre-Y2K suffered from that
 MK> particular issue. However without a suitable method for offlining then
 MK> both Bluewave and QWK fell by the wayside.  I see the same thing happen
 MK> with Fidonet utilities for somewhat the same reason(s).

Yes, a lot has been left to decay, though there are promising signs nowadays.

 TL> So, can you describe it more accurately?

 MK> Not without knowing your experience with shell scripting in an Unix
 MK> enviroment.

Let's see, certainly at least 15 years of serious shell scripting, including
writing a ham radio remote base that is mostly a handful of shell scripts that
interface thelinkbox, Hamlib and a number of GNU utilities, to enable a radio
to be remotely controlled via RF (on a lical, attached repeater), Echolink or
directly over the Internet (though I'm leaving the writng of a web interface to
a suitable web programmer ;) ).  I've also interfaces an Echolink binary to
IRLP (look up "EchoIRLP on the web - a large part of that project was my
scripting ;) ), and done similar with the conference server side of things. :)

So, try me, I'm no stranger to scripting. :)

 MK>  I've heard DOS-think types describe shell scripting as batch file
 MK> programming on steroids.  Does that help any?  The messages under the
 MK> subject line "another one bytes the dust" have oneliners that could
 MK> easily end up in a bash script. In my particular case I use bash but
 MK> there are other shells.  I started out my shell scripting life using
 MK> csh (aka C shell) on Solaris and made the move to bash later when
 MK> installing linux on PC's.

I use bash shell scripting a lot. :)
... I had a cat once... tasted like chicken.
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