misc/dync 1.1nb2 NetBSD

The dync utility is a small, but quite useful utility, which allows the use of C as a scripting language. This can be quite useful ****SOMETIMES****, allowing access to system calls and library functions from the command line. For example, there are occasions when I want to see the struct stat for a directory entry, and want to be able to access st_mtime values, without having to parse output from "ls -l". A simple:

int main(int argc, char **argv) { struct stat st; if (stat(argv[1], &st) == 0) { printf("%lld\n", st.st_mtime); } exit(0); }

will do the job. If I was to try this by other means, I would either have to install all of Perl, and then learn its idiosyncratic syntax, or write a custom C program, which I would then have to compile on each architecture I need.

This utility relies on there being a C compiler on the target machine, and a working dlopen(3).