csh question
Guy Harris
can't the Bourne shell have features like history, alias,
unset, setenv, notify, and best of all, job control? There
is absolutly nothing about these features which is dependent
upon the C syntax. In fact, these features would work even
better in the Bourne syntax!
Well, Dave Korn of Bell Labs decided that the C shell wasn't the only shell
worth developing; the "Korn shell" is a shell compatible with the Bourne
shell, but with a history and aliasing mechanism (the aliasing mechanism
has both short C-shell style aliases and full-blown builtin shell scripts,
which can have multiple lines and loops and everything) and job control
(as well as arithmetic and arrays). I've not used it - there don't seem to
be may copies outside the Labs - but a talk was given at the last USENIX on
it and it looks like a winner. So call up Larry Isley at Western's licensing
group in Greensboro, NC, and pester him unmercifully until Western gets its
act together and licenses it - in source form, please, not all of us are
running 5.0 on a PDP-11, VAX-11, or 3B.
Guy Harris
{seismo,mcnc,we13,brl-bmd,allegra}!rlgvax!guy