richardh@killer.UUCP (Richard Hargrove) (05/26/88)
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I received an advertising packet the other day from POLYTRON Corp. in
which they listed two products, PolyShell and PolyAwk, for sale as a
package for $149. From what little I know about the MKS toolset, the
POLYTRON package looks like it's competing for the same market.
PolyShell looks to be a reasonable implementation of the Bourne shell with
a few C shell extensions (command history, setenv, aliases) and one Korn shell
extension (fc). The material said PolyShell could be run on top of MS-DOS
or be installed as the resident shell with the SHELL directive in CONFIG.SYS.
Some of the Borne Shell features that were claimed to be supported that
I've wished I had under MS-DOS were command substitution, the full set of
parameter substitution operators, and the full set of i/o redirection
operators (including "here files"). The package includes a number of Unix
commands:
cat, cp, chmod, cmp, cut, diff, du, egrep, fgrep, grep,
head, ls, more, mv, mkdir, pr, rm, rmdir, sed, split, tail,
tee, tr, touch, wc, whereis, cu, uuencode, uudecode, df, and mf
(though I'll admit I already have pd versions of all of these except
for egrep, sed, and split) as well as shell built-ins. The second piece of
the package, PolyAwk, is claimed to be a "true implementation under MS-DOS"
and includes a copy of the book _The AWK Programming Language_ by Aho,
Kernighan, and Weinberger as the product manual.
The $149 price tag is a special deal. PolyShell lists for $99 and PolyAwk
lists for $99 ($85 without the book).
I know very little about the MKS Toolkit, and was wondering how the above
outline of the POLYTRON products might compare to it.
Send replies to me and I'll summarize.
richard hargrove
...!{ihnp4 | cbosgd | codas}!killer!richardh
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