xstr, mkstr

[Gary Jennejohn]

On Mon, 2 Jul 2018 21:58:43 -0700
Eitan Adler <lists at eitanadler.com> wrote:

> On 24 June 2018 at 02:51, Eitan Adler <lists at eitanadler.com> wrote:
> > Why are these tools in base? As far as I could tell these tools are
> > un-used in the build process and otherwise specialized tools. Is there
> > any reason we still have them in the toolchain or in base?  
> 
> Anyone? They don't cause acute problems, but having specialized and
> specific tools like this don't seem like they belong.
> 

Reading the man pages it appears that these are old baggage left
over from the PDP/VAX legacy of BSD.  Their whole prupose was to
reduce the memory consumed by strings in binaries on machines
with little RAM.

In fact, the BUGS section of mkstr(1) makes this very clear.

xstr is actually used in /usr/src/contrib/bmake/mk/prog.mk.  I
can't tell whether this file is ever invoked.

It's commented out in some other makefiles.

There's a test for mkstr in
/usr/src/contrib/netbsd-tests/lib/libc/regex/t_exhaust.c.

Both are in /usr/src/usr.sbin/crunch/examples/really-big.conf.

-- 
Gary Jennejohn