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From: chet@cwns1.CWRU.EDU (Chet Ramey)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: which/type & built-ins
Message-ID: <1990Jan2.160927.11935@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>
Date: 2 Jan 90 16:09:27 GMT
References: <1297@quintus.UUCP>
Reply-To: chet@po.CWRU.Edu
Organization: Case Western Reserve Univ. Cleveland, Ohio, (USA)
Lines: 25

In article <1297@quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

>The manual page for sh says
>     type [ name ... ]
>	  For each name, indicate how it would be interpreted if
>	  used as a command name.
>This certainly looks to me as though "type if" SHOULD succeed, and
>"type type" _does_.  So why does "type while" say "while not found"
>rather than "while is a shell builtin"?

Because `while' is a sh language construct (a statement), not a shell
builtin.  It's a small but important distinction, and one of the chief
reasons that programming in sh is so much better than programming in csh
(in csh, these constructs *are* implemented as builtins, using very ad-hoc
parsing with thousands of special cases that serves to reduce their
usefulness to almost zero). 




-- 
Chet Ramey
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chet@ins.CWRU.Edu