* * * * *
                                        
     So how does one bootstrap a development system from the command line?
                                        
A few years ago I mused about bootstrapping a development system under MS-DOS
from the command line [1]. Now, I personally haven't done that, but I can see
how it could be done.

But Edmund Evans came close to doing just that [2] (link via Hacker News
[3]). He “cheated” by having a program that converted hex codes to binary.
It's not that bad though, under Linux, you have a bit of an easier time
generating binary data:

> /bin/echo -e "\177\105\114\106\001\001\001\000..." >hex1
> 

(it's coincidental that this method also uses octal values instead of hex—
Unix began life in an octal environment).

That small quibble aside, Edmund did the bootstrapping procedure pretty much
how I envisioned it.

And in following a few more links from the Hackers News commentary [4], I see
that Kragen Sitaker referenced my previous entry and did the initial
bootstrap [5] (making a program to read text into binary) from the MS-DOS
command line (how odd—that mailing list with only one member [6]).

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2009/11/05.1
[2] http://homepage.ntlworld.com/edmund.grimley-evans/bcompiler.html
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7503721
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7503721
[5] http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2011-April/000519.html
[6] http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

.