Ping puzzle

[grg22 at ai.mit.edu (Greg Galperin)]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 03:21:13AM +0000, John Chambers wrote:
> Funny thing:  I have an expect that I used on a project a  couple  of
> years  ago,  and  find couldn't find any "unbuffer*" files.  I looked
> around on a bunch of machines, including some RH 7.2 and 8.0 systems,
> and none of them had expect or unbuffer. Then I found it on one of my
> home machines that's still running RH 6.2.  /usr/bin/unbuffer is four
> years old (older than my expect source), but it works. Maybe I should
> grab a new expect and install the latest version. Maybe I should grab
> a new tcl/tk, too. At the moment, it's very handy that I've left that
> one machine at RH 6.2, though.  But it may be a 9.0 system soon ...
> 
> Funny thing about finding this old unbuffer:  I copied it around to a
> bunch  of  other  machines, several linices, FreeBSDs and OpenBSDs on
> Intel hardware, and the binary worked on all of them. So much for the
> supposed competition and enmity between these crowds.  I think that's


Binary?  On a RH62 box I've got, unbuffer is a text script:

$ file `which unbuffer`
/home/grg/bin/unbuffer: a /usr/bin/expect -- script text

No wonder it works so well on different OSes.  Bet it'd work on Solaris too. :)

$ cat `which unbuffer`
#!/usr/bin/expect --
# Description: unbuffer stdout of a program
# Author: Don Libes, NIST

eval spawn -noecho $argv
set timeout -1
expect

--grg