Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: echoing style - DOS,VMS vs. Unix (was: AT&T Joining OSF)
Message-ID: <8437@smoke.ARPA>
Date: 5 Sep 88 03:57:49 GMT
References: <1988Sep2.224258.27960@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> <1402@spp2.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 14

In article <1402@spp2.UUCP> baur@spp2.UUCP (Steven L. Baur) writes:
>Sh  will willing backspace over the prompt even on BSD systems.

Not true.  BSD /bin/sh is invariably run in "cooked" mode, where
the terminal handler takes care of such things as character erasing.
And the "new" BSD terminal handler, which is the only one anyone in
his right mind uses on BSD, does not erase past the beginning of the
input.

When history/command editing is enabled in the BRL sh, characters
ARE individually read and acted on immediately, same as the Korn shell.
We also don't backspace before the beginning of the input.  (At
present we also don't emulate line wrap for terminals that lack it,
because we don't want the shell to have to depend on termcap.)