GNU shell utilities

A collection of simple command line utilities also known as sh-utils, that was originally developed to replace traditional UNIX command line utilities with GPL licensed versions. Note that some of them make no sense with a traditional OS/2 command line or a replacement such as 4OS/2 but may make some sense if used with an UNIX like shell similar to Bourne Shell (sh) or bash. All of the utilities in the package have better or better suited native alternative available for OS/2.

The primary use of these utilities is when porting software from UNIX like operating systems that have dependencies on those or utilities with the same name, instead of patching the source to point to OS/2 equivalents and testing if they have compatible I/O, you can simply make the sh-utils a dependency. The development of the package had been minimal for most of its lifetime and inputs & outputs appear not to have changed at all, so it is usually not a huge issue if you have a severely outdated binary version of the package on your computer. The GNU shell utilities have been folded into the GNU coreutils package and are no longer developed or distributed on their own.

Versions

• Last known version: sh-utils-2.0.15 (2003)
• Last known 32 bit OS/2 version: [sh-utils-2.0] (2001-10-09)

This version can handle Japanese (Shift JIS) file names and I/O,

• Last known 16 bit OS/2 version: sh-utils-1.3 (1991-10-29)

Prerequisites

• EMX runtime 0.9d or later.

Known issues

The EMX sh-utils package runs on DOS as well as OS/2 but with the same caveats that some of them are meaningless in a DOS shell, furthermore one or two of the utilities do not like being restricted to a file system with 8.3 character limitation and one or two of them have minor I/O errors.

Utilities included in the sh-utils-2.0 binary package

• basename.exe
• date.exe
• dirname.exe
• echo.exe
• env.exe
• expr.exe
• factor.exe
• false.exe
• hostname.exe
• id.exe
• logname.exe
• pathchk.exe
• printenv.exe
• printf.exe
• pwd.exe
• seq.exe
• sleep.exe
• stty.exe
• tee.exe
• test.exe
• true.exe
• tty.exe
• uname.exe
• whoami.exe
• yes.exe

Licence

Open source software, 1.3 version released under the GPL, later versions released under the GPL v2.

Authors & publisher

• Free Software Foundation
• Jun Sawataishi (OS/2 port)
• Takayuki Nakagawa (DBCS/Shift JIS code for OS/2 port)
• Kai-Uwe Rommel (Original OS/2 port)