still@usceast.UUCP (Bert Still) (05/15/88)
Ok, it's been a little while since we had a real good "religious war" here in comp.unix.wizards, and I have this strange feeling that this might turn into one of those... however, here we go. (In the classic style of debate.) WHEREAS a significant number of users on System V based UN*X machines use the Berkeley shell (hereafter, ``csh''), WHEREAS the style of csh more closely resembles the C language (hence the name of the shell) than the Bourne or Korn shells, and WHEREAS many distributors of System V based UN*X provide csh in their standard distribution (for example NCR and Hewlett Packard), be it RESOLVED that csh should be included as a part of System V in the same sense that the ``vi'' editor, and TCP/IP have been included. (The preceding remark was for the benefit of those who enjoy a good debate. I know that I do. :-) TRANSLATION: I have heard several vendors of System V based UN*X state that the Berkeley shell is not provided as a part of their distribution because they do not perceive a need in the user community for csh. I would like to see what the people of the net, who use UN*X based systems on a daily basis, think of this issue. And, since I started this discussion, I will provide a first round. As I'm certain will be obvious, I am in a university environment where I use both BSD and System V environments (in user and/or systems administrator roles, on several different machines). Of all of the other users on these systems (about 50 people), I count only 6 people who actually use the Bourne shell for most (or all) of their work. Incidentally, as far as I know, no one uses the Korn shell. (I checked the passwd and accounting files just to be sure.) While I realize that this may not be typical of all installations, I believe it is typical of a university environment, and unless I am badly mistaken the number of UN*X installations at universities outnumbers the number of commercial installations (note that at the moment I am discounting the PC market: Xenix, System V/AT, etc. because this is a different market, but that I am including workstations). Anyone out there have an opinion? Bert still@cs.scarolina.edu Systems Manager Math/Stat Computation Center University of South Carolina