pinard%iro.umontreal.ca@RELAY.CS.NET (Francois Pinard) (06/26/89)
A nice hello :-)
I gave bash a try recently and am quite impressed by the product.
Great thanks to those who provide us with such a tool! I never really
liked csh syntax, but used tcsh anyway for its Emacs-like history
editing. Bash allows me to go (forward) away from both.
I write to both bfox@ai.mit.edu and bug-bash@wheaties.ai.mit.edu, not
knowing exactly which address I should prefer. Would someone please
acknowledge this message if it reaches its proper destination?
Here are a few comments, bug reports or suggestions about bash.
* The ``help'' command is useful. The idea might be extended so to
give a few words about each variable having a special meaning to the
shell. Not specifying a variable could list all such variables.
* ``help ['' is not accepted, but ``help test'' is. However, ``[''
is present in ``help'' summary, ``test'' is not. This could be
clarified a little.
* If this was easily feasible, some kind of describe-bindings or
apropos in Readline would be helpful, too.
* The ``type'' command does not always behave according to its
documentation. The following:
which () { echo `type -type $*`; }
which which
returns ``function file''. Should'nt it return a single word?
* By the way, is there a way to remove a function? Some kind of
``unfunction which''?
* C-l, clear-screen, clears the current command line and redraws it.
According to the documentation (in FEATURES), it is supposed to
clear the whole screen. I would rather bring the documentation in
accordance with the behaviour than the other way around (*sigh*),
but in any case, documentation and behaviour should agree.
* M-?, asking for a completion list, seems to produce lines at end of
which there are useless, extraneous spaces.
* expand-line (M-C-e) does expand aliases and backquotes, however, it
does not expand tildes, accolades and other patterns, as I was
expecting it to do. I would have liked to request:
print * M-C-e
and then, to edit out a few files I would not print, say.
* Long line edits are one character off if not in the leftmost part.
(Hum, this one is harder to describe...) On a more than non-empty
directory (:-), please try:
echo `ls` M-C-e C-a
and move the cursor with C-f past the right edge of the screen.
This should redisplay another piece of the line within < and >. If
you continue moving with C-f, you will notice that the cursor slowly
``rewrites'' the line one character to the left. Playing a little
on this theme might uncover other similar bugs, too.
* In prompts, \# is supposed to be the command number. Even if there
was a saved history, the command number starts at 1 for a new shell.
However, the command numbers showned with ``history'' do take into
account the previous, saved commands. Would'nt it be easier for the
user if those command numbers were coinciding?
--
Franc,ois Pinard pinard@iro.umontreal.ca
(514) 588-4656 ``Vivement GNU!'' ...!uunet!iros1!pinard