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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).

This has only, as yet, been tested on NetBSD/i386.

Alistair G. Crooks
agc@uts.amdahl.com
Thu Aug 13 15:26:56 BST 1998