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From: gnb@melba.bby.oz.au (Gregory Bond)
Newsgroups: gnu.bash.bug
Subject: Some minor bash nits/wouldlikes
Message-ID: <8909010622.AA04478@baby.bby.oz>
Date: 1 Sep 89 06:22:08 GMT
Sender: daemon@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Distribution: gnu
Organization: GNUs Not Usenet
Lines: 54

Coming from a (SunOS 3.5) csh environment, there are a few things I'd
really like to see in bash:

For history, a few inconsistancies:
There is no :gs operator for replacing on the whole line.
e.g.
	% echo hello hello
	hello hello
	% !!:gs/ll/xdr/
	echo hexdro hexdro
	hexdro hexdro
And the existing :s operator doesn't do delimiter-escaping or
&-expanding.
e.g.
	% echo qweryuiop
	qweryuiop
	% !!:s/qwer/&t
	echo qwertyuiop
	qwertyuiop
	% echo hello/world 
	hello/world
	% !!:s/llo\/wo/ll0\/wo/
	echo hell0/world
	hell0/world

Fixing this would require some rewrite of the :s processing in
history.c.  I am intending to look at this at some point soon.  Is
there some philosophical reason why this is a bad idea (e.g. a
decision that the csh history mechanism is in some sense flawed)?

2)  When starting window tools in the background, they inherit the tty
state from bash and use that for the command window.  (The tool I
notice this from is Sun's dbxtool).  This leaves the dbxtool command
window in cbreak/noecho mode.  Most annoying.  And you can't start it
in foreground and then ^Z it as dbxtool ignores ^z.  Dammit.

I guess this is in general impossible to ensure, because you can never
tell when the background task has read the tty state and thus it is
safe to reset it.  Just put it down to broken dbxtool.  Should be
documented pretty clearly in the eventual manual.

3) Sun csh does completion on ~u<ESC> for usernames.  A useful feature
I may add one day.

4) Sun csh, when given a "cd dir1" will try current dir, then cdpath,
then a shell/environment variable called "dir1".  I've found this
really usefull for working on multiple versions of the one source: a
command can set shell variables for make, etc, and vars for src, run,
lib etc. Then "cd run" changes to the correct run directory.  Again,
should be easy to add.  The sun version didn't know about paths, so
perhaps you could make "cd dir1/dir2" equivalent to "cd $dir1/dir2".


Greg.