sunny@decwrl.UUCP (09/14/84)
Greetings: It would seem, that in this eternal war of "my way is better" that perhaps both sides can be right at the same time. The Bourne shell does things like catching interrupts better than the C shell does, so if you've got some peculiar ideas in mind about how some script should handle interrupts, use the Bourne shell. On the other hand, for you everyday top level shell, I find that the power of the alias command in the C shell is indispensible: Just as a Macro assembler allows higher level functions to facilitate programming, the alias command allows higher level commands to help you with interactive programming of the machine. If you think of your .profile or .cshrc as merely a vehicle for performing simple defaulting and initialization of a few system parameters, then that's all you get. On the other hand, if you use your .cshrc file to "redefine" the command set of the machine by giving yourself high level macro commands (aliases), then you can improve the speed of your interaction greatly, through reduced typing, and thinking, to get a given function done. Unix is all about pipes and filters. Csh aliases give you the power of both *without* having to take the time to read a file from the disk (a shell script, or filter). When you can look at your command history (csh, again) and see that most of the commands you execute are aliases rather than raw Unix commands, then you'll know you've optimized the command structure to the way *you* work. It's trivial to invoke a sh script from a csh alias. Why not? Set the sticky bits on both sh and csh, and it'll always work quickly. -- {ucbvax|decvax|ihnp4}!sun!sunny (Sunny Kirsten of Sun Microsystems)
gwyn@BRL-VLD.ARPA (09/18/84)
From: Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn@BRL-VLD.ARPA> Personally I think the Bourne shell functions are better than Cshell aliases. I am having a fine time with my UNIX System V Release 2 shell. Even better, Ron Natalie added job control to it. Now, if we could figure out a good way to edit command history (Cshell ! stuff is not the right way), we could junk csh altogether. Anybody have a good history mechanism for the Bourne shell? (It's hard..)