[net.sources] PC-SHELL suggestion

madd@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP (12/11/86)

In article <1799@ncoast.UUCP> kent@ncoast.UUCP (Kent Williams) writes:
>As for those who have called my program a 'naive implementation', go write 
>your own, and come back 3 months later and talk to me.

No kidding.  I've been writing one too, and it's tougher than it looks.

>The NEXT version you see on the net will be rewritten from the ground up -
>I am reverse-engineering csh from the Xenix V.2 documentation.  If any 
>Berkeley Purists out there want it to be any more c-shell like, they can
>send me the manual page for the berkeley C-Shell.

Suggestion:  Use a hot-key to make a pseudo-suspend command.  This would
allow you to drop back into PC-SHELL and do resident commands (such as cp,
cd, rm, etc).  This immediately makes the shell more useful and more UNIX-
like, with relatively little work.  (I've already played with the idea --
it works.)

>For those of you who expressed disdainful opinions of my program, keep in
>mind the effort that went into it, with little assurance of any reward.  I
>estimate that my financial return per copies in use right now is about
>25 cents a copy.

But did you have fun making it?  That's why I'm writing mine.

jewett@hpl-opus.HP.COM (Bob Jewett) (12/12/86)

> The NEXT version you see on the net will be rewritten from the ground up -
> I am reverse-engineering csh from the Xenix V.2 documentation.

    Since you're investing all that time, you might as well do the right
    thing and emulate ksh instead.  At least put in the vi/emacs command line
    editing features.  (You get a one-line very wide window in the command
    history stack.)

    I used csh for five years.  I loved it.  It took me a day to see that
    ksh was a vastly superior user interface.