Re: [screen-devel] PATCH: new 'if' primitive

[Micah Cowan]

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Steve Kemp wrote:
> On Tue Oct 21, 2008 at 12:21:48 -0700, Micah Cowan wrote:
> 
>> IMO, this would be much more useful if it could also perform basic tests
>> on env var values (this could eliminate the need for your hostname and
>> username primitives), and against the version number of screen.
> 
>   Those would be good enhancements, yes.
> 
>   What kind of syntax would you consider?  I'd expect something like:
> 
>     if $USER -cmp "steve"
>     if $UID  -lt 1000
> 
>   It would also be nice to have backtick support, such that
>  "if `uname -a` -cmp "2.6.17" ..

There's plenty of time to discuss it, given that it definitely wouldn't
be added for 4.1.0. If Lua support is mature by then, then the obvious
solution would be to just use that, instead of inventing something new.

Other than that, I'd say that in general it'd be good to emulate shell
semantics, both for test-like comparisons and for subshells. Not
necessarily full-featured support, but those features we choose to
supply should probably mimic Bourne/POSIX syntax.

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer.
GNU Maintainer: wget, screen, teseq
http://micah.cowan.name/
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