tomsrtbt: Yes, mawk is being replaced by Lua

[Tom Oehser <tom@...>]

> >> be 8-bit-clean.  I am writing Lua versions of things like
> >> cut split head tail wc tee and other small shell utilities
> >> and the like ...
> 
> does this mean you're recoding utilities in tomsrtbt in Lua? If so, that's
> fantastic!

(For those who don't know, tomsrtbt is a single-floppy Linux distribution,
useful for rescue and other things, available via http://www.toms.net/rb/)

Yes.  mAwk is being replaced by Lua.  I am already done with buildit.s,
filesize, getopts, unrpm--, tee, head, dirname, basename, wc, and split.

I'm working on cut and still have grep to do and also the reference manual
before I can release the first cut.  (Tomsrtbt includes manpages, the mawk
manpage is distributed at 32,455 bytes, I'm butchering the Lua to roughly
the same size and including it, of course).

Eventually, I expect to include sockets, regex, md5, maybe poslib and
bitops, and re-write netcat and the telnet/telnetd kludges, replace snarf,
probably also write a dhcpcd and sort and some of the busybox stuff in
Lua.

Given that tomsrtbt includes vi and emacs and man pages and help, it may
be useful as a self-contained learning and utility environment for Lua
users, also.

It will not have luac, everything will be in source.  It will probably not
include the debug library.

I expect to release it relatively soon at the cost of not having grep
done, the first cut at it, as soon as I finish cut.

I had been frustrated for a while with mawk not handling nulls, there were
starting to be a lot of really ugly workarounds.  Mawk is 87317 on the
floppy, Lua is only 72529 with the basic and no debug, 85269 with sockets
also, 92129 with lualib also, and 95161 with md5 too, so it is a clear
space win, in addition to freeing me up to replace more things.

It is too bad, I was going to write a dhcpcd in awk+netcat, now I'll never
find out if I could really have done it...

-Tom