Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!rex!uflorida!gatech!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!corton!inria!cict!irit!pfeiffer From: pfeiffer@irit.fr (Daniel Pfeiffer) Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell Subject: shells? Message-ID: <1455@irit.irit.fr> Date: 9 Apr 91 16:15:36 GMT Sender: usenet@irit.fr Organization: Instituto de Reser^cado pri Informadiko de Tuluzo (IRIT) Universitato Paul Sabatier Lines: 43 Originator: pfeiffer@penelope Gosh, so many shells! When I started UNIX all we had was Bourne shell, so I learnt this and dreamed about C shell. When I finally got that, it fairly much turned me off, so I stuck with Bourne. Then came C Shell, Toronto C shell, Korn shell, Bourne Again shell and I just read about ash ... I don't need a huge shell (as in csh's 266240 bytes compared to sh's 102400 which is still a whopper)! Of course with paging and swapping it doesn't make a difference, but I just don't _like_ it :-) I don't need a history or a command line editor, GNU Emacs does that better than any shell will ever be able to! Does some shell just provide improvements over Bourne shell. Given the amount of code that exists for Bourne shell this should be upwards compatible. For example I heard that [ test ] is a built in for ksh. Does that mean we have we can say (without ;): if [ test ] then while [ test ] do The only things I miss in Bourne shell is a list type or something like that, so I can get at ${27} or ${$#} for command line args, and for similar but separate structures of my own. And it would be nice if it could do some clever redirection for builtins and functions in pipelines, rather than fork off a subshell for each one. Then we wouldn't have to bend over backwards to set variables, cd and other things. -- -- Daniel Pfeiffer -- Tolosa (Toulouse), Midi-Pyrenees, Europe -- "Beware - polyglot esperantist" -- N _---_ / \ NEWS, it goes around the world. W (-------) E (sorry, my bitmap doesn't have a world-class resolution) \_ _/ --- S