Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!purdue!decwrl!shelby!portia!forel!karish From: karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt Subject: Re: AIX Peculiarities Message-ID: <4267@portia.Stanford.EDU> Date: 4 Aug 89 22:55:51 GMT References: <13000@well.UUCP> Sender: USENET News System Reply-To: karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) Organization: When necessary Lines: 61 In article <13000@well.UUCP> gors@well.UUCP (Gordon Stewart) wrote: >I received an e-mail message from an IBMer asking me to mention a couple >of examples of AIX's peculiar commands -- >those that deviate from Sys V by having non-standard names, or by having >(horror of horrors!) multi-character options! > >Two examples off the top of my head -- > >'print' (whatever happened to 'pr'?) `pr' is there. I use it all the time. > has several multi-char options, > including 'dd' (drop dead) and 'ca' (for 'cancel') I don't much care for these, either. >'tctl' takes options 'rewind' 'retension' 'reset' etc.... These are quite similar to the options to the BSD `mt' command, which performs the same functions. This usage reflects prior art. >Trust me when I say that these aren't the only ones! Why should we? If we're going to put up with this ill-tempered babble, you might at least follow through and substantiate your criticism. >Such "improvements" we can all live without!! Neither of these are the gratuitous re-namings of existing SysV utilities you seemed to be complaining about in the original note. The `print' command is not in the SVID. On BSD systems, it's a trivial shell script that calls `pr', then `lpr'. Earlier versions of AIX came with the FTP utility named `xftp' and the TELNET utility named `tn'. The BSD `rsh' utility was called `remsh', to avoid conflict with the SysV restricted shell (`rsh'). As of 2.2.1, all three have the BSD names, and the restricted shell is called `Rsh'. >It's still not "user-friendly"! >Assume, for a change, that even naive users have a modicum >of intelligence, and can figger out command options (or run 'man') -- >but what happens when the new user writes a nifty shell program, moves >it to the /usr/local/bin directory, and finds that when he/she types >the command, he/she gets a "file not found" message -- still gotta do a >rehash! You're taking IBM to task for not re-writing the C shell? What should they call it, after they fix everything you don't like? They provided two alternate user interfaces with AIX (neither of which I use when I can avoid them) that are, arguably, more user-friendly than the C shell. >Michael Sierchio >"The opinions expressed herein aren't necessarily" I quite agree. Chuck Karish {decwrl,hpda}!mindcrf!karish (415) 493-9000 karish@forel.stanford.edu