ag@amix.commodore.com (Keith Gabryelski) (12/15/89)
In article <476806de.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> rehrauer@apollo.HP.COM (Steve Rehrauer) writes: >In article <38703@lanl.gov> tjf@lanl.gov (Tom J Farish) writes: >>The main problem those of use raised on VMS have with unix is the >>lack of easily remembered commands, I think. > >I'll agree that on the surface, VMS is friendlier to new users. Certainly >"SHOW this" and "SET that" seem more intuitive than the usual Unix equiv- >alents. Possibly. >But VMS' command-language badly suffers from verbose syntax and >excessive "slashism"; "SHOW this and that / except=blah / foo / >bletch=45". I may know that I want to "SHOW" something, but arriving >at the arcane sentence to do it isn't always trivial. The special options are for more experienced users and should not be taken into account when talking about new users. New users need not pay attention to the /except=blah stuff. They only need to know how to invoke a command and which command to invoke to get what they want. It is somewhat easier under VMS (TOPS-20 for that matter) to get help for certain commands then it is under unix. The `?' in the COMND% JSYS was just A Good Thing(Tm). It lent itself well to getting programmers to offer help on the command line. VMS's HELP is not quite as good, IMHO, but is still a quantum leap ahead of Unix's `man somethingobscurethaticantrememberthenameofanyway' and without an index feature in man(1) you HAVE to know the name of the command you are looking for documentation for or you are hosed. >>want to do a DIRectory? Use 'ls' of course! > >I'm frankly surprised they didn't make it "SHOW DIR" in VMS. (No >smileys.) An interesting point was brought up, by a colleague of mine, this morning. It seems that Dr. Farish has been brought up incorrectly; How do you DO A DIRECTORY? What you want is to list the files in a directory; LIST (LS if abbreviate) is much more intuitive than DIR. Now, I was brought up with ^F to list files in a directory. :LISTF came later and DIR came even later (on other systems). LS took me some time to get use to but I have seen the light. :-) If you've really got problems with this, try: [Bourneism ahead]: dir() { ls -l ${1:+$@} echo "Use LS damnit" >&2 } Follow ups set to alt.religion.computers. Pax, Keith -- ag@amix.commodore.com Keith Gabryelski ...!cbmvax!amix!ag