Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!paperboy!meissner From: meissner@osf.org (Michael Meissner) Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell Subject: Re: Bourne shell history (was Re: Finding the last arg) Message-ID: Date: 10 Jan 91 23:22:03 GMT References: <1991Jan2.174157.21530@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> <316@audfax.audiofax.com> <1991Jan9.215829.9890@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> <317@audfax.audiofax.com> Sender: news@OSF.ORG Organization: Open Software Foundation Lines: 22 In-reply-to: arnold@audiofax.com's message of 10 Jan 91 17:41:09 GMT In article <317@audfax.audiofax.com> arnold@audiofax.com (Arnold Robbins) writes: | In article <1991Jan9.215829.9890@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> chet@po.CWRU.Edu writes: | >Another thing new with the V.2 shell that I forgot to mention is the source | >conversion from `Bournegol' to C. | | And, boy, did it make a difference! A quantum leap in readability and | maintainability (and therefore modifiability) of the shell. It seems to me | that at about V.2 AT&T got serious, and went through *everything*, formatting | the C code, regularizing argument parsing via getopt, and so on. I seem to remember that people were saying that the C version of the shell was much faster in doing shell scripts then the Bournegol version, though I suspect the real win was caused by not exec-ing test and echo. My .profile seems to do a zillion if's and such, and it was MUCH faster using a modern shell (System V.2 /bin/sh, ksh, or bash) than the tired old V7 shell (which Ultrix shipped as /bin/sh). -- Michael Meissner email: meissner@osf.org phone: 617-621-8861 Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142 Considering the flames and intolerance, shouldn't USENET be spelled ABUSENET?