Re: How to set /etc/fstab again after system has started

Here in comp.os.linux.misc,
et472@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Michael Black) spake unto us, saying:

CBFalconer (cbfalconer@xxxxxxxxx) writes:

There is a real need in Linux/bash for the facilities of 4dos,
especially including the provision for attaching an arbitrary
'description' to any file. In addition the 4dos provisions for
switching directories and command history are superior to bash.

If there's a real need, either it's in one of the other shells, or
someone can write it.

It seems to be hard for some reason for some UNIX people to grasp that
good features and ideas actually exist in other operating systems.

For this reason, many otherwise useful features seem to never make it
into Linux or the BSDs. :-(

This is true for both the CLI and the GUI, BTW. No X window manager or
desktop seems to have implemented OS/2 workgroup folders, either, but I
know a few folks besides myself who would love to see them implemented
on a Linux desktop somewhere. It's such a nice way to group multiple
programs together into a logical work unit and run/close them as a set
instead of having to do it all individually, but grouping programs into
execution groups is a foreign concept to UNIX/Linux GUIs (AFAICT).

It's not as if the shell is what makes Linux Linux.

No, but if one spends a lot of time at a shell prompt, the features of
that shell prompt become somewhat more important.

There are many areas where Linux shells are seemingly lacking when they
are compared to 4DOS/4OS2. You folks might not see it, but I suspect
you haven't been using 4DOS/4OS2 for the past decade plus, either. :-)

For me, the big one is "select", which allows any shell command or alias
to use a fullscreen point-and-shoot interface to arbitrarily select the
target files for an operation, and which allows for some customization
of the file list presented as well as the method used to execute the
defined command(s) against the selected file list.

It's sometimes very nice to be able to use visual file selection within
a shell command without having to run an actual file manager.

For example:

alias tdel select del (*.*)

creates an alias called tdel which allows the user to interactively
scroll through a file list and then tag (and subsequently delete) an
arbitrary set of files in the current directory.

alias tunz select unz (*.zip)

provides a point-and-shoot interface to process selected zip files in
the current directory and run an unzip script on them.

Not everything lends itself well to wildcards, and I miss the select
command under Linux a lot. :-(

--
-Rich Steiner >>>---> http://www.visi.com/~rsteiner >>>---> Mableton, GA USA
Mainframe/Unix bit twiddler by day, OS/2+Linux+DOS hobbyist by night.
WARNING: I've seen FIELDATA FORTRAN V and I know how to use it!
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
.

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