Re: making a perl script TSR? (on linux)

Check out this node Re: Writing a Perl Daemon for some example code that uses Proc::Daemon and Proc::PID_File to do the hard work.

By the way, does anyone else thing that Terminate and Stay Resident is a dumb acronym? You are not terminating the program, it is just running in the background! I guess Disk Operation System wasn't really a brilliant TLA either...

Comment on Re: making a perl script TSR? (on linux)

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Re^2: making a perl script TSR? (on linux) by Ven'Tatsu (Deacon) on Aug 20, 2005 at 21:39 UTC
The term Terminate and Stay Resident made sense when it was originaly used. A basic overview was that for one program to provide extra functionality to the user after another program was started under a single task, real mode OS what it would do is load all the information and code it needed into memory, then tell the OS that it was quiting but not cleaning up it's memory. The OS would oblige and the program would 'stay resident' in memory after it had 'terminate'd. This program could say be a sound or mouse driver. Another program would come along and it would know about that some driver that it might like to use could be resident. It would ask the OS for a list of resident programs and their addresses in memory, and seeing one it was interested in it would take it's memory address and knowing that it alway provided a certain function at a predefined location after it's start of memory it would make a call to that location and the TSR could then take an action on the running programs behalf. DOS could also be considered resonable as many OSes for micro-computers of the day were stored in ROM not on a disk, thus the distinction that the OS was stored on writable media was important to some people.	[reply]
Re^2: making a perl script TSR? (on linux) by rruiz (Monk) on Aug 21, 2005 at 08:09 UTC
Coming from a DOS background, I had to second Ven'Tatsu on saying that the term really made sense at that time (at least for us poor DOS user's ;) Anyone remember Side Kick(TM), The Norton Guides(TM), etc. It was cool to have 640K 10Mhz XT computer and be able to run Turbo Pascal 3(TM) as editor and call those little gizmos to look-up a library reference or something. And, as Ven'Tatsu said, some programs apparently keep running, but then there were some (like the ones mentioned), that just were sitting there waiting for their Hot-Key to be pressed to become alive! Ah, many good memories... ;) And also the classic Assembler 101 assignment to make a TSR clock program. Wasn't that cool. ;) God bless you rruiz	[reply]


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