Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!otello!gear!am!alex From: alex@am.sublink.org (Alex Martelli) Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell Subject: line-editing and history (was: Questions concerning BaSH) Message-ID: <1991Jan12.160128.564@am.sublink.org> Date: 12 Jan 91 16:01:28 GMT References: <71792@bu.edu.bu.edu> Organization: Premiata Famiglia Martelli & Figli Lines: 32 melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes: :I found BASH 1.05 to be very unstable. I wouldn't use it as my login :shell. There are several major patches for it that you should be sure :to get if you decide to use it. I might try it again when 1.06 is :released. For now though, I recommend tcsh. I've been using bash here at home for months with no crashes, just occasional glitches. :BTW: The BASH binary(like most GNU binaries) is quite large. The funny thing is that MOST of the size is in the readline() stuff! It's a goodly subset of emacs, so powerful and flexible. For my ("MASH") mods to Almquist's ash, I first tried adopting GNU's readline()/history(), but that more than tripled the shell binary's size, and I don't *really* need all that power - so I replaced it with a hard-coded (very complete) vi-one-line editor, redid history() [without the nice but code-costly csh-history stuff], and now mash fits comfortably in Coherent's 64K+64K memory model. If you are able on your system to stash readline() away into a shared library, and run several GNU (or yours) binaries using it, that would be a nice solution indeed; not as nice as having the editing done outside of the applications, as in atty or cled, but, alas, I never was able to make one of these work for me (maybe it would be easier if I knew all the magic of Streams? but I don't...). -- Alex Martelli - (home snailmail:) v. Barontini 27, 40138 Bologna, ITALIA Email: (work:) staff@cadlab.sublink.org, (home:) alex@am.sublink.org Phone: (work:) ++39 (51) 371099, (home:) ++39 (51) 250434; Fax: ++39 (51) 366964 (work only), Fidonet: 332/401.3 (home only).