puder@burdvax.UUCP (07/14/83)
The important differences for me are that the Bourne shell provides arbitrary redirection, and the C shell provides job control. This is why I use csh as my login shell and sh (usually) to write shell scripts. I would rather use one shell that combined the good features of both, but I don't have time to write it. Karl Puder burdvax!puder SDC-aBC, R & D Paoli, Pa. (215)648-7555
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (07/17/83)
Job control in the Bourne shell may be on the way. During a discussion
of job control in the "Unix Directions" panel at Usenix, Dennis Ritchie
made the following cryptic statement (as near as I can remember):
Somebody in the development group had a very good idea.
It's been implemented. It will be in System VI.
He was picking his words very carefully, and would not elaborate. It
sounds to me like something is on the way, but it may be rather different
from 4bsd job control, and perhaps cleaner (I sure hope so...).
--
Henry Spencer
U of Toronto
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henryguy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris) (07/17/83)
Somebody from Bell told me that 1) yes, UNIX 6.0 would have job control and
2) yes, it would be different from Berkeley's. One thing he mentioned is
that it would not involve any changes to the terminal driver; I don't know
if they plan to support suspending the "current" process or, if so, how they
plan to do it.
As for a shell with the history, aliasing, and job control features of the
C shell but upward compatible with the Bourne shell, Dave Korn of Bell Labs
gave a talk at Usenix about such a shell which he did. It has:
a history mechanism; I believe it has "ed"-style command-line
editing, and it also has "vi"-style and "emacs"-style editing
a simple alias mechanism, and another mechanism called "functions"
which seems (from the VERY brief mention of it) to provide in-line
shell scripts - i.e., you could have a function which contained an
in-line shell loop.
arithmetic built into the shell, and one-dimensional arrays
C shell-style job control when it runs under 4.?BSD
It also has several new builtins ("print", which is an in-line form of "echo",
is one) and an extended version of "read" with prompts and other features
permitting "read"s from multiple streams.
Now the bad news: so far, it's only available within Bell. Western is
considering releasing it; Korn says you should call
(919) 697-6530
to talk to the people at Western to urge them to get it out. (He gave his
phone number and net path - the latter is ihnp4!mhb5b!dgk.) He wants to
see it released, as I'm sure those of us who might want some of the C shell's
functionality but dislike the C shell's way of providing it (or who just
dislike having to deal with two shells) would.
Guy Harris
{seismo,mcnc,we13,brl-bmd,allegra}!rlgvax!guy