# rc shell and new gopher server

I had been dipping in and out of the Plan9 rabbit hole, without
going too deep.

If you had been following along recently, then you know I had also
been experimenting with ed and sam which lead me to install vis,
which shares sam's command language.

In the process my OpenBSD system has become a bit of a Franken-9,
with rc as the shell on my local system and installed on my server.


## rc shell

After using perl for many years I find POSIX shell quite limiting,
especially the lack of lists/arrays. So when I discovered the rc
shell has lists, much cleaner syntax and had dispatched a number
of bourne keywords determined to be redundant. I decided to give
it a try.

There were three options in the OpenBSD repos, ordinary, and with
editline or readline:

>        1: rc-1.7.4p1
>        2: rc-1.7.4p1-editline
>        3: rc-1.7.4p1-readline

As I like modal commandline editing I gave both of the later a try.
I settled on the readline variety as it seemed more compatible
with what I had become used to with ksh's vi-mode.

I started by creating an .rcrc file and converting my existing
kshrc to rc.

This was a very helpful learning experience to start to familiarize
myself with the syntax, as was reading Tom Duff's paper on the rc
shell[1].

I modified my prompt to include the directory path using the examples
from the paper. Then in short order I converted my aliases to
functions and ported the remainder of my ksh functionality.

By comparison the resulting file looks a lot neater.


## gopher server (gophrc)

Encouraged by what I had learned so far, I wanted to continue
familiarizing myself with the language.

The best way for me to do that is be creating some small project.
I am of the type that learns through doing and a small project is
usually how I go about learning.

I remembered I had started writing a gopher server in shell that
ran from inetd but had run into some issues and mostly given up on
the idea after discovering Katolaz had already created one called
gosher[2].

So, for the past couple of days I have been chipping away at making
*gophrc*[3] a gopher server that runs from inetd and that can work
with my existing geomyidae formated menus and cgi programs.

You are reading this file from that experimental server.


## Summary

It has been a great learning experience and I am a great fan of
home brew software.

I feel that rc shell has a lot of potential, but that I am still
missing a lot regarding nuances of the language.

If you know of any more documentation than that I've linked below,
then please drop me a line.

If you spot anything that doesn't work or things I could have done
better in rc shell, then likewise please let me know.


## References

[1]( http://9p.io/sys/doc/rc.html )
[2]( gopher://katolaz.net/1/software/gosher )
[3]( gopher://gopher.icu/0/files/gophrc )

You are viewing proxied material from gopher.icu. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.