Derek Holzer wrote:
...is painfully slow! It takes minutes sometimes to execute a command that the terminal handles is a second or two. Why is that? Does anyone else have this problem?
i cannot help you here, but most likely it is a problem with initializing a context: everytime you call shell, it will have to restart the shell-interpreter which will take some time (when you start the terminal it also takes some time...once the terminal is up and running it is faster, but you don't get this with the [shell])
btw, this is the reasons why many often-used applications are often re-written as daemons (e.g. i have a virus-scanner that usually get's called from the cmdline to scan a file - this is too slow if you are using it on a mailserver; therefore there is a daemonized version of the scanner which is always running and which takes the data to be scanned via a pipe)
this is also one of the reasons i hardly ever use [shell] but usually write a small shellscript server (using ./pdreceive) and send data to this server via [netsend] (and vice versa) i often find this more stable (and fun), but it is more complicated to setup.
Also, it doesn't seem to understand, for example "cd /home/derek", since a "pwd" command immediately after still lists "/" as the current dir.
what makes you think it doesn't understand? whenever you call shell, it will open up a new context. so when you send "cd /home/derek" it will changedir into /home/derek (from /) and then quit. when you call "pwd" it will print the working directory of a fresh context (which is /) it is like when you open a terminal and do a "cd /usr/local" and then open another terminal and do a "pwd"... this behaviour is the same on all platforms.
therefore you one usually uses scripts for more complex operations: $ cat /tmp/doit.sh #!/bin/sh cd /home/derek pwd
and then do [/tmp/doit.sh( | [shell]
fmadsr. IOhannes