I don't like legalese, so here I'll give a history of hey & it's various authors (as far as I've traced it back, that is; if anyone can fill me in on anything I'm missing let me know). The original hey program was written in the Bourne shell, because unix1, the TCD server it was developed on didn't have PERL. This shell program was develped by Adrian Colley, from TCD. Paul McGaley, a friend of Adrian's, later translated the hey program into a PERL version. Much Later, in DCU, another PERL version was written be Adam Kelly, Colin Whittaker & David Madden. At this point, it was noticed that many PERL interpreters had to start for people to send hey's back and forth, and so I figured it was worth a rewrite in C. c-hey's options and environment variables are taken from the Adam & Co. version. Since then much of the development has been untaken by RedBrick members such as Robert Crosbie, John Bolger and Colm MacCárthaigh. Notes: unix1: TCD UNIX server, back in "the day". TCD: Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. DCU: Dublin City University, Ireland. Redbrick: DCU Networking Society, Ireland. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Small ChangeLog: 1.2: Readline support was added by Robert Crosbie . 1.3: Support for heying from a mesg n terminal was added by Colm Mac Cárthaigh . 1.4: hey now issues a warning if there are no valid recipients } hey now initialises readline properly so that rl_readline_name="hey"; allowing $if "hey": constructs in the .inputrc A va_arg macro portability problem was fixed. An install tab was added to the makefile. autoconf support was enhanced, the configure script now searches for the correct compiler (and settings), install utility and system libraries. c-hey is now pretty portable ;) . 1.5: extra warning "feature" from 1.4 removed x@rb's prompt patch for c-hey was rolled in to the main source - ability to have customisable prompts now possible - added -n option, because ppl like different lengths added specific eof support, a string can now be used to determine EOF instead of the standard unix way of doing things, this makes it easier for mac users .. apparantly! added much better handling of being switched between background and foreground, c-hey now refreshes your screen so you can more easily take up where you left off :) make install depend on "stripped" fixed gcc3.0 warnings 2.0: screen handling was added, to allow multi-line editing this is one BIG change :) - includes bindable readline functions, with sane defaults - refresh on ctrl-l , for interrupted heys dependencies in Makefile.in now come from gcc -MM cleaned up the configure script a little 2.1: BUGS: Adrian Colley suggested a number of bug fix's which included: - Calling printf from sighandlers. - g_listGet and g_listDel bugs. - hey_user structure sizes. - extra checking added to hey_prompt. - realloc() error handling added to hey_user_input. - Iterators used in dyn_pageRead, the old function wasn't reentrant because of it's static state. - strprint bugs. - set_mesg bug. - Extra checking added to hey_main. - Updates to c-hey/doc/history. Most of this bug fixes have been implimented by Colm MacCárthaigh New Features: -f filename allows you to specify a file, filename, with a list of usernames to hey. This feature was introduced to allow easy heying of groups i.e. $ c-hey -f ~/.friends -o "" Allows you to specify a "hey footer", string, for you hey. The hey footer is essentially the same thing as the hey title except it appears on the last line of the hey, rather than the first. It can be specified on it's own or with a hey title. These hacks were added by Mark Campbell ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So there you go. If you like hey, let me know where you're using it so that I can massage my ego. Thanks Cian ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ future releases of c-hey and bugfixes can be found @ http://c-hey.redbrick.dcu.ie/