Message-ID: <37AF3DF4.333B713@Wireless.Com>
From: Mike Cheponis <Mike@Wireless.Com>
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Subject: Re: Why no job control in Minix?
References: <37AE8393.724FD9DC@Wireless.Com> <1dqmo7.j8h.ln@mega.am.cs.vu.nl>
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Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1999 13:45:41 -0700
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Kees J Bot wrote:

> In article <37AE8393.724FD9DC@Wireless.Com>,
> Mike Cheponis  <Mike@Wireless.Com> wrote:
> >
> >Kees J Bot mentioned previously he hated Job Control.
>
> Quite.  I never use it, and find the effects on backgrounded jobs
> "Stopped (tty input)" irritating.  Luckily it is not too difficult to
> get around it, on Solaris I use a shell that doesn't know about job
> control, the same shell Minix names /usr/bin/ash.
>
> >I find ^Z pretty useful.
> >
> >I know that minix-vmd did implement job control, but I'm wondering, why
> >not have ^Z in regular 2.0.2 minix?  Is it some philosophical issue?
>
> Well, it's an awful lot of work, and quite a lot of added code.
> Process groups, stopped programs, signal stuff.  That's a bit too much
> for a simple system.

OK, fair enough.  Sometimes I wonder when something as conceptually simple as
pausing a process needs so much code to support that perhaps the architecture is
faulty?  (I'm not blasting Minix architecture, which I find to be refreshingly
transparent; rather I'm talking about the "unix experience" here.  [And to that
guy who wrote some other OS based on Minix: Yeah, I'd give him an
"F" in my OS class, too!])

As for Paul's concern:

>I find ^Z pretty useful.
>
I don't! The trouble is, it is very easy to type ^Z instead of ZZ at
the end of a vi session. ^Z is also a very common control character in
other OSes such as DOS and VMS, where it does completely different
things. I guess your attitude depends on whether Unix was your first
real OS or not. Those of us that have come to Unix at some stage
generally find the shell job control stuff pretty alien and tend not
to use it. On Linux and Minix, for example, I just open lots of
sessions rather than using fg/bg all the time.

Best regards, Paul
Paul Sherwin Consulting     22 Monmouth Road, Oxford OX1 4TD, UK
-------------------

It's not so much that I like the character ^Z to send a signal to a process to
cause it to suspend, rather it is the -concept- of job control I like.

When you start some process, and it's taking a while and you want to do something
else, I find it convenient to ^Z then bg the thing, and continue on.

I'll be the first to agree that unix control characters are twisted, and that
unix, in general, is a pretty bad model for an OS - but, unfortunately, most
everything else is worse.

-Mike


