Writing MPW Tools
MPW included a set of standard C libraries sufficient for developers to build their own MPW tools. Many Unix utilities could be ported with little change. One point of difficulty was the Mac OS newline convention, which was different from Unix. Another was the pathname separator, ":" in Mac OS, but many Unix utilities assumed "/". Many Unix utilities also assumed pathnames would not have embedded spaces, a common practice on Macs.
For a number of years, the GNU toolchain included portability support for MPW as part of libiberty. This was used to support MPW-hosted cross-compilers used by General Magic and several other developers.
Read more about this topic: Macintosh Programmer's Workshop
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