doprog 2.2

0.  Introduction
1.  Installation
2.  How to use doprog
3.  Changes (see file CHANGES)
4.  Known bugs
5.  More with it


0.  Introduction

   This is a simplistic utility to spawn programs on new ttys.


1. Installation

   Running 'make install' as root should take care of proper installation.
Customize paths by editing the Makefile (defaults are /sbin and /usr/man/man8).


2.  How to use doprog

   From any shell prompt or script or whatever, run
	doprog $DP_TTY $DP_PROG $DP_ARGS
where
	$DP_TTY is the tty where to spawn the program,
	$DP_PROG is the program to spawn
	$DP_ARGS are the arguments to the program.

Example:
	doprog /dev/tty2 emacs my_personal_notebook

   I use doprog in /etc/inittab at runlevel 1 and 2 or through aliases
on my home computer, so it directly opens whichever programs I use, without
my authentifying myself more than I need. Be careful on public computers.
   Doprogw waits for the child to terminate, and returns the same as
the child does.



3.  Changes

* Jim Weigand wrote doshell(8)
* James Cloos stripped it down to doprog(8), adding the possibility to
 have arguments to the process spawned, named it version 2.0.
* Fare Rideau removed some uninitialized pointer bug that compiling in
 ELF revealed, and overloaded the package with his usual over-talkative
 README. Also added the wait feature. Named it 0.2 then 0.3,
 until he saw an lsm talking about James' version being 2.0,
 so renamed it to 2.2 instead.
* You saw the package and [used|deleted] it (pick any one) and perhaps
 enhanced it.


4.  Known Bugs

   doprog should
* make more tests, including
 - tty already being open,
 - user being authorized to open the tty and run program
* have command line options and configuration files for the former
* setup terminal process groups (?)
* update /var/run/utmp and /var/log/wtmp files (?)

   But who cares ?
   I'm using it on a home machine, so only root-able users access this,
and all this pseudo-security crap doesn't matter. I hate the
everything-or-nothing security crap from unix and alikes anyway.
Tunes will provide fine-grained security anyway.


5.  More with it

   If you enhance this program in any way, feel free to upload it to sunsite
with an increased version number (e.g. 2.3), so everyone benefits from it.
Or you can send me some patch/whatever. Or even better, do both !

--    ,        	                                ,           _ v    ~  ^  --
-- Fare -- rideau@clipper.ens.fr -- Francois-Rene Rideau -- +)ang-Vu Ban --
--                                      '                   / .          --
Join the TUNES project for a computing system based on computing freedom !
		   TUNES is a Useful, Not Expedient System
WWW page at URL: "http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/rideau/Tunes/"
