[BusyBox] Re: network enabled awk

[Rainer Weikusat]

"Peter V. Saveliev" <peet at peet.spb.ru> writes:
> On Monday 22 August 2005 19:53, Rob Landley wrote:
> <skip /> 
>> 
>> 2) What on _earth_ would this kind of thing be used for?
>
> awk is a text processor. So, network extension can be used for
> test processing over network.
>
> nc | awk is _not_ enough in some cases.

Certainly not. But what should be enough for all cases is something
like

	socket -p 'awk -f ...' <host> <port>

'The text processor' does not need to be able to open sockets, as long
as 'a socket opening program' can do that and pass the socket to 'the
text processor' (one of the things I happen to use around here is 'the
socket listener' that passes forcibly redirected connections to 'the
connector', which connects to the original destination and then calls
'the protocol processor' [in this case, for end-user transparent mail
scanning of POP3 sessions]. And there are, given that this arrangement
is running on something which would have been a pretty fast
workstation not more than seven years ago, of course, none of the
"mythical problems" that people constantly try to find with the
UNIX(*) model of solving complex problems --- fork doesn't hurt me,
exec doesn't hurt me, preemptive multiprogramming doesn't hurt me
etc).

It is not necessary to have a single program running on a computer
which has all the required functionality, including kernel, C-library,
mail reader and flight simulator linked in. Really.