Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!smsc.sony.com!dce
From: dce@smsc.sony.com (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: System V Release 4.0 versus BSD
Keywords: UNIX System V Release 4.0 BSD
Message-ID: <1990Jul20.135837.27801@smsc.sony.com>
Date: 20 Jul 90 13:58:37 GMT
References: <179@mixcom.UUCP>
Sender: news@smsc.sony.com (Usenet News System)
Reply-To: dce@smsc.sony.com (David Elliott)
Organization: Sony Microsystems, San Jose, CA
Lines: 78


In article <179@mixcom.UUCP>, llxxkk@mixcom.UUCP (Adam Costello) writes:
|> quote
|> What is wrong with Sys V:

I'll answer to each of these, based on a port of SVR4 that Sony
is currently doing using the source from AT&T.  We have not grabbed
stuff from a BSD release and slapped them on top.

|> 	No finger

/bin/finger

|> 	No who

/bin/who

|> 	No what

/usr/ccs/bin/what

|> 	ps works funny (and not nearly as well)

Which ps?  /bin/ps has different options and output, but the only
problem I've seen with /usr/ucb/ps is that it doesn't print
wait channels symbolically.

|> 	echo is hacked

Oh, you mean it has the \-escape support that has been in AT&T Unix
for years?  Didn't that originally come from Berkeley?

|> 	the csh is not supported worth dog dooky

I agree.  We found (and fixed) a number of bugs in csh, and there
are places where it's obvious csh was ignored.  Still, I use it
every day.

|> 	stty has not half the options

Which stty?  /bin/stty is different, but I think it actually has more
options, since it also supports many BSD-isms.  /usr/ucb/stty has
the same options as a BSD stty.

|> 	shell scripts execute with the Bourne Shell no matter what

If you are a csh user, this isn't true.  If you are a ksh/sh user,
it is.

|> 	the #!<interpreter> line for scripts is not supported

It works just fine.

|> 	the csh is crippled (very poor job control)

No problems for me, and I really use the hell out of job control.

|> 	the only alternative to the csh is ksh, a worthless hack on sh

This is a pretty unreasonable statement.  ksh provides much superior
functionality to csh.  The main differences are syntactic, not semantic,
so the problem of switching from csh to ksh is mostly a problem of
what you are used to (and I just found out that you can alias !! to
r, so I think I'm switching to ksh today).

|> 	BSD network niceties are not supported (like telnet)

They're all there.  We use them every day.

|> In a nut shell, it sucks.  (Why else does Sun ship BSD?)
|> end of quote

I don't know about the Amiga version, but I do know that it's
possible to combine the SVR4 source from AT&T with a competent
group of Unix systems engineers and produce a very good version
of Unix.

Are you sure your friend has used SVR4 and not SVR3?