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From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Help needed with conditional statement for alias in csh
Message-ID: <9583@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 20 Sep 90 17:08:15 GMT
References: <6932.26ed237f@uwovax.uwo.ca> <26553@mimsy.umd.edu> <1990Sep18.223605.29379@eua.ericsson.se> <1990Sep20.090627.20515@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 26

In article <1990Sep20.090627.20515@Neon.Stanford.EDU> dkeisen@Gang-of-Four.Stanford.EDU (Dave Eisen) writes:
: In article <1990Sep18.223605.29379@eua.ericsson.se> per@erix.ericsson.se (Per Hedeland) writes:
: >IMHO the best solution is to use the other conditional construct, that
: >happens to be common to sh and csh, and apparently unbroken in the latter:
: >
: >test -s /usr/spool/mail/miller && (echo ""; echo "New mail"; echo "")
: >
: 
: Speak for your own C-shell. 
: 
: In SCO Xenix, the C-shell thinks it really is C:
: 
: 	test -s /usr/spool/mail/miller 
: 
: returns 0 (assuming the file is nonempty) so the C-shell doesn't 
: evaluate the second half of the conditional expression.
: 
: && and || both work exactly the opposite of how one would expect them to 
: work (and of how they do in fact work in the Bourne shell).

So use a binary editor, go in and swap the || and &&.  Or rm /bin/csh.

Such malprogramming should not go unpunished.

Larry Wall
lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov