perley@mazda.steinmetz (Donald P Perley) (08/19/88)
I figured a lot of people killed the other "shell" subject line due to all the punctuation name drivel. What are the plusses of the various shells available? Is there one that is really close to a unix shell (c or bourne)? The 2 I have used are Matt Dillon's and Tshell. I assume most people in this group are familiar with Matt's. Tshell has some nice features, and some quirks. As well as the now infamous backquote, you can end a command with "&" to spawn it off into the background. It can run scriptfiles without an "execute" command, or "run execute" required by Matt's. scripts can have recursive subroutine calls and "for", "while", and "do" loops. There are a couple of odd wildcard characters for filename specification: hierarchical recursion and sense inversion. It has the concept of / as the root directory, with disks as partitions. If you are on df0: you can access another drive as "/vd0/whatever" or "../vd0/whatever" or "vd0:whatever" There are short and long "man" pages for all commands accessable with the help key. unfortunatly, some of the "improvements" on csh lead to incompatibilities: For example: since there is a recursion wildcard in name specification, there is really no "need" for -r options in a lot of utiities. If the shell runs across a token that happens to be the name of a defined variable, it gets instantiated (no "$" required); this may not be what you want, ie if the token is also the name of a file. You can force literal interpretation by putting the token in quotes. I won't say that csh can't be improve upon, but I would prefer the emphasis to be on upward compatibility so scripts can be easily ported from one to the other. Fortunately the product is young, and the author is seeking user input for future releases. (so far, updates are free). General stuff: Tshell comes on a bootable workbench disk. It takes a lot of disk space, but I found that by moving the documentation to another disk I can fit the things I REALLY want to have all the time, like wiconify, mg, and dnet. I haven't had the product that long, there are surely some facets and features I have missed. I know there are more shells out there... anyone want to describe them? -don perley
rap@ardent.UUCP (Rob Peck) (08/23/88)
In article <11923@steinmetz.ge.com>, perley@mazda.steinmetz (Donald P Perley) writes: > What are the plusses of the various shells available? Is there one that > is really close to a unix shell (c or bourne)? > > I know there are more shells out there... anyone want to describe them? > > -don perley Or maybe Don could move to an island out in the ocean, and create his own Shell program. Then we'd also have access to the "Perly-Shell, from the ocean..." hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm hmmmmmmm hmmmmmmm hmmmmmmm (oh wow, I feel real guilty about this, (sorry Don) :-) :-) ) Rob Peck