The shell printed "finished" every time a program gave the machine back.
That made sense when starting a program and getting the machine back was
most of what the machine did and the prompt was the only other thing on
the screen. Under a listing, between two commands, it is noise.
And it was printed whatever the program made of it, so a program that had
just explained what went wrong was answered with the word "finished" -
"there is no such directory: nowhere" and then, immediately, "finished".
The prompt coming back is what says a program is over. It is the same
argument osLastStatus is made of: a program that failed has already said
so in words, and anything the shell adds beside that is the shell talking
over it. A program that FAULTED still says so, because the fault screen
printed in red above and a program that is gone should not look like one
that ended.
A NEWLINE ONLY IF ONE IS WANTED. A program that stopped part way along a
line would leave the prompt sitting in the middle of its last output,
which the word used to prevent by accident. The console knows which
column the cursor is in, so the shell asks - where a blank line printed
every time would be right about half of the time, and an empty directory
listed with ls would be followed by a blank line for no reason.
Fifty nine recorded sessions lose the word. Two of them move a cursor up
a row with it, which is the same fact seen from the screen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
"do build.sh cosmos.asm" looked for a file called "build.sh cosmos.asm",
because scriptOpen copied the whole rest of the line into the name. So a
script could be told nothing, and a launcher - a script whose entire job
is to hand on what it was told - could not exist.
Now the name is cut off the front and what follows is kept whole. $1 to
$9 are the words of it, walked out on demand, and $args is all of them.
Nothing is stored per parameter, so there is no limit on how many a
script may be handed and no second number to keep in step. Both ways of
starting a script pass them on: "do" and typing the name.
A word that was not given is an error that stops the script, like every
other name this shell does not know. Expanding it to nothing would let a
command run with an argument missing and then report success, which is
what stop-on-failure exists to prevent. $args is always set inside a
script, empty if it was given nothing, so "if same $args" can be asked.
---- And the count that describes the block was already wrong ----
Found while adding a field to it. The state one script keeps for another
is saved by a single copy of a fixed number of bytes, and that number was
71 against a block of 77: six bytes of line position had been added in
the middle of it years after the count was written. So the tail of every
saved script was never saved, and #quiet in a helper stayed behind in the
script that called it - the opposite of what this file's own comment
promises and the README documents.
The unsaved line position turned out not to matter, because a loop keeps
its own copy in the block record. Nothing said so. Three numbers describe
this block and all three now say so in a comment, and cosmosScriptNest
ends on a helper that goes quiet and a caller that must not stay that
way.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5