Douglas@YALE.ARPA (02/11/84)
From: Craig Douglas <Douglas@YALE.ARPA> Brief description of X-shell A small collection of programs patterned after ones found with UNIX. Included is a Bourne shell and over 40 supporting commands. I/O redirection is provided and variable and filename expansion for all commands, whether they came with X-shell or not. It is not an implementation of UNIX, nor is it a multitasking operating system. X-shell is a program which runs under the DOS shell and provides services for the rest of the support commands. Requirements IBM PC, XT, or clone MS DOS (1.1 or 2.0) 256K (resident part of X-shell is 68K) 2 disk drives (floppy or hard) (I find 1 hard sufficient) 30K worth of frequently used programs are nominated for a RAM disk. Further, some small temporary files associated with variable evaluation and pipes should be on the RAM disk. A RAM disk of 32K or greater is suggested. Support programs A partial list of the support commands is as follows: cat chdir/cd clear cmp comm cp date echo expand expr false grep hd head ls mkdir mv num pr pwd rm,rmdir sh size sort sum tail tee test time tr true unexpand uniq wc words Known problems DOS 1.1: Redirection works only for X-shell commands DOS 2.0: Redirection works only for X-shell commands Only mkdir and chdir accept paths debug, basic, and basica do not work Promised update to be received in February find, cpio, and more full support for DOS 2.0 redirection for all DOS programs faster .exe file loader hashing of directories on PATH list additional shell features: "here documents", read, and eval Comments grep takes wildcards in its filename arguments. In fact, most commands act like the UNIX originals. There are minor inconsistencies, but nothing that should cause much anguish. The documentation comes with explicit directions on installation, a tutorial, a good reference section, and gory directions on how to report problems. An index might be useful, but probably goes against UNIX philosophy (no flames, please). My own personal wish list includes online help (i.e., man), make, and m4. I find the lack of pathnames in most commands irksome, but I believe the problem will be fixed shortly. To use programs written in Basic, I just exit X-shell and run the program from DOS. Restarting X-shell is a snap. Finally, this is not a free package, but I would shell out the bucks again. It is quite considerably cheaper than IBM's UNIX and has many of the advantages (but not all, like multitasking). It has the further advantage of easily running my favorite MS DOS applications without having to reboot. Product ordering Standard Datacom, Inc. 415/775-8882 Suite 6195 (Cash, VISA, MC) 1550 California St. San Fransisco, CA 94109 -------