Using shell commands versus C equivalents

[Garrett Cooper]

Danny Braniss wrote:
>> --Rgf3q3z9SdmXC6oT
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>> On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 10:55:18PM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>>     
>>> Another simple question (I hope):
>>>    Is there any reason why shell commands should be used in place of a=20
>>> C command (in this case chmod via vsystem instead of the chmod(2)=20
>>> function)? It seems like the fork / exec would be more expensive with=20
>>> the shell command, but any area where code could be optimized is more=20
>>> than welcome I would think.
>>>       
>> There often are reasons to prefer using shell commands to C.
>>
>> There typically exist many tradeoffs involved in evaluating one over the
>> other, and "machine efficiency" is not always the highest goal.  (For
>> example, it may be better to reduce complexity in favor of having a
>> simpler structure that is easier for people to understand and maintain
>> with confidence that the changes they make have the desired results.
>> This is, of course, not to try to claim that shell scripts are
>> inherently easier to understand than C code; that would be a silly
>> stance to take.)
>>
>> I commend to your attention Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer's "C News"
>> (a successor to Rick Adams' "B News") implementation, a great deal of
>> which was written as shell scripts (ca. 1988 or so).
>>
>> (Yes, I realize that that was almost 20 years ago, and that it
>> didn't involve FreeBSD per se.  Ignoring the lessons of history is
>> rather short-sighted and foolish:  despite using shell scripts for
>> so much of the "code," the machine I was then running went from
>> being extremely busy all the time to having a couple of bursts of
>> activity per day for about an hour each time -- with more news
>> flowing with C News vs. B News.)
>>
>>     
>
> read the question again, though it is not absolutely clear/correct, the question
> was:
> 	chmod(path, mode)
> vs
> 	system("chmod ...")
>
> and not wheather to write a program or a shell script.
>
> danny
>
>
>   
Sorry -- actually I meant that (along similar lines), there was a 
program with the following lines:

vsystem("/bin/chmod +x %s", filename);

and I replaced it with:

chmod(filename, (mode_t) ( S_IXUSR | S_IXGRP | S_IXOTH ));

Probably won't yield much gain overall, but every drop counts and there 
are quite a few iterations performed in the pkg_* programs, in 
particular dealing with X.org.

Next step, eliminating the linked list structure in favor or red-black 
trees, maybe.

-Garrett