[cs631apue] sws and sish graded

[Jan Schaumann]

Hello,

I've just sent out grades for 'sws' and 'sish'.  If you have not
received a grade, please let me know asap.  I will hand in letter grades
tomorrow.

I was glad to see some good progression in many of the 'sws'
submissions.

In 'sish', I noticed that many of you chose to ignore my advice of not
writing any code that you don't need and instead implemented convoluted
and lengthy command-line prompts containing the username, hostname, and
current directory.

In the future, please do yourself the favor or not writing any more code
than absolutely necessary.[1]  Aside from the likelihood of introducing
bugs, you may not create a feature that users find useful.

(Some other shells may implement the option to allow the user to
customize the prompt, but unconditionally creating very long character
prompts like

jschauma at avalon.srcit.stevens-tech.edu /home/jschauma/teach/apue/sish/some/other/dir$

is not actually helpful.)

It seems that most of you have learned to check your malloc(3) return
codes, so I'm going to chalk that up as a win in this class.

I hope you all learned a bit about what's involved in writing an actual
shell, and you can now at least guess at how some of the other features
of your normal shell might be implemented.


This concludes this semester -- I hope you enjoyed the class and even
the assignments somewhat and I wish all of you the best for your future.

Happy holidays, and a happy new year,
-Jan

[1] http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/every_line_is_a_potential_bug.html