inferno programmer's notebook

NAME lab 83 - lcmd local cpu NOTES While thinking of the Simple Grid Tutorial Part 1 and Part 2 , I wondered whether I could implement the equivalent of rcmd(1) but for a local emu launched using os(1). For example, lcmd math/linbench 100 would launch a new emu, export the local fs to it through a pipe rather than a network socket, and run the command in that namespace. The idea seemed simple, no apparent obstacles, but it actually took me a couple of evenings to get it to work. So I'm posting it more because of the effort rather than its value. First lets look at what rcmd does, ignoring the networking. Given its arguments it builds a string, calculates its length + 1, and writes the length then the string to a file descriptor, then exports the local namespace to the same file descriptor. Well that part is easy to do in sh(1). Here it is as a braced block assuming all work is done on file descriptor 1. fn lcmd { load expr string args := $* s := sh -c ${quote $...