16.10 Exercises

1. Add functions to implement system calls such as chown(), chmod(), and umask() to the file operations extension presented in Internal File Ops.
2. Write an input parser that prints a prompt if the input is a from a “terminal” device. You can use the isatty() function to tell if the input file is a terminal. (Hint: this function is usually expensive to call; try to call it just once.) The content of the prompt should come from a variable settable by awk-level code. You can write the prompt to standard error. However, for best results, open a new file descriptor (or file pointer) on /dev/tty and print the prompt there, in case standard error has been redirected.

   Why is standard error a better choice than standard output for writing the prompt? Which reading mechanism should you replace, the one to get a record, or the one to read raw bytes?

3. (Hard.) How would you provide namespaces in gawk, so that the names of functions in different extensions don’t conflict with each other? If you come up with a really good scheme, contact the gawk maintainer to tell him about it.
4. Write a wrapper script that provides an interface similar to ‘sed -i’ for the “inplace” extension presented in Extension Sample Inplace.