Re: Recursion and shell functions

[Eric De Mund <ead@xxxxxxxxx>]

[ Discussion moved from zsh-workers here to zsh-users. --Eric]

Rau'l,

Rau'l Nu'n~ez de Arenas Coronado <raul@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> First of all, please excuse this a-bit-off-topic question, but I need
> to know if a feature available in zsh is portable.

Jason Price <jprice@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> You could re-invent the wheel, but why?
> (cd <your source dir> ; tar -cpvf - .) | ( cd <your dest dir> ; tar -xpf -)

Rau'l Nu'n~ez de Arenas Coronado <raul@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> The aim is to depend only on the shell and POSIX utilities (like 'cp',
> 'rm, etc... you know.). I want to impose little or no dependencies.
> 'tar' is not a good solution for me, I prefer 'pax', although is not
> as extended by now, 'rsync' seems to big for copying a few bunch of
> files, and 'ssh'... well...

I love Zsh, but is it the right tool for this job? If dependency or
contrib software minimization is a requirement, I'm not sure how Zsh got
picked. In the past, when I've only been permitted one tool to do a job
that a system's supplied Bourne(-like) shell wasn't capable of perform-
ing, I've chosen Perl. If that hadn't been appropriate, I would have
perhaps next chosen BusyBox:

    BusyBox
    (combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single
    small executable, providing a fairly complete POSIX environment for
    small or embedded systems)
    http://www.busybox.net/

Everybody likes screenshots. Here's BusyBox's:

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| $ ./busybox                                                                |
| BusyBox v0.60.3 (2002.04.27-10:33+0000) multi-call binary                  |
|                                                                            |
| Usage: busybox [function] [arguments]...                                   |
|    or: [function] [arguments]...                                           |
|                                                                            |
|     BusyBox is a multi-call binary that combines many common Unix          |
|     utilities into a single executable.  Most people will create a         |
|     link to busybox for each function they wish to use, and BusyBox        |
|     will act like whatever it was invoked as.                              |
|                                                                            |
| Currently defined functions:                                               |
|     [, basename, busybox, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, chvt,          |
|     clear, cp, cut, date, dd, df, dirname, dmesg, du, echo, env, false,    |
|     find, free, grep, gunzip, gzip, halt, head, id, init, kill, killall,   |
|     klogd, linuxrc, ln, logger, ls, lsmod, mkdir, mknod, mkswap, modprobe, |
|     more, mount, msh, mv, pidof, poweroff, ps, pwd, reboot, reset,         |
|     rm, rmdir, sed, sh, sleep, sort, swapoff, swapon, sync, syslogd,       |
|     tail, tar, test, touch, true, tty, umount, uname, uniq, uptime,        |
|     wc, which, whoami, xargs, yes, zcat                                    |
|                                                                            |
| $ _                                                                        |
|                                                                            |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Regards,
Eric
--
"Larry Wall wrote the original Perl in 1986-87, the same two successive years
he won the IOCCC. ...this was no fluke... Perl and Obfuscation are as insepar-
able as, say, camels and humps." --David Lowe

Eric De Mund <ead@xxxxxxxxx> | Ixian Systems, Inc. | 53 49 B2 23 AF 6C 20 81
http://www.ixian.com/ead/    | Mountain View, CA   | ED DD 4C 81 AA C9 D1 A5