Wirt writes:
> In essence, MPE's :SH command would simply be redirected to the underlying
> Linux shell.

But that seems useless to me as the Unix shell would have no knowledge of,
or access to, MPE files or the MPE environment.  So you might as well switch
to a different window or a different machine.

> If "whatever" exists in Linux, it now also exists in MPE.

I don't see how having "whatever" in the host OS does you any good in a
virtual MPE environment or is any different than having "whatever" running
on another box over in the corner.

> (ii) the legal problems associated with whatever proprietary code
> now exists in the MPE POSIX shell would also disappear. It would
> no longer be reachable and thus never expressed. Nor is any "un-
> intertwining" engineering effort necessary.

I'm sorry you don't like Posix, but it's here to stay and most current
customer environments would break without it.  It's the best implementation
of the POSIX standard that I've seen on a non-Unix platform.  It works very
well to enable the execution of Unix freeware applications on MPE, which I
find it hard to see as fundamentally evil in some way.

Yesterday I think you indicated that that you liked HFS and didn't consider
it necessarily a "Posix" feature.  If I understood that correctly, then I
don't understand what features of "Posix" you don't like, because after HFS
there really isn't anything you can put your finger at in MPE and say
"There!  It's Posix!  Shoot!  Kill!".  Most of "Posix" is a lot of clever
little enhancements to the HPFOPEN intrinsic, a native Bytestream file type,
the HFS directory, and a handful of little utility programs and an
alternative C library file that uses the new HPFOPEN, Bytestream, and HFS
MPE features to implement the Posix C interface standard.

So to me, the huge Posix monster seems to be little more than a mouse hiding
in the corner.  If you don't like it then you can purge the Posix C library
file, and purgegroup HPBIN.SYS.

None of what I think you're calling Posix is part of the core operating
system itself.

Gavin