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Re: [Haifux] using unix page: early draft

Tzafrir Cohen
Sun, 16 Sep 2001 14:51:38 -0700

On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Nadav Har'El wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 17, 2001, Tzafrir Cohen wrote about "[Haifux] using unix page: early 
>draft":
> > In this course the students write two c++ assignments, and one csh
> > assignment (right, Alon?)
>
> Forgive my asking (I guess that everybody here already knows my position on
> csh ;)), but why is the Technion still teaching csh?? Csh has been considered
> inferior to almost any alternative (ksh, bash, zsh) for at least a decade...
> Do they teach csh anywhere else in the world?

I figure that it is enough to get those silly jobs (from the assignments)
done.

But the student learns about piping, and about simple tools like head,
tail, cut, cat and alike (the assingment forbids you explicitly to use awk
and sed. Hmmm... they haven't mentioned perl). So moving from there to
bourne shell is not very difficult.

> [Google for "csh programming considered harmful" for Tom Christiansen's
> essay on why csh is bad].

The link is already in the page (look at the bottom). This is one spesific
point where I could not agree with the course syllabus.


> P.S.#2: After the Technion moves to another shell, my next project will be to
> do something about its fixation with pine ;)

I considered mutt. The problem is:

* it is not availble on Tx and CSD (it took me a lot of bugging just to
  get the sysadmins to upgrade pine to a decent version)

* I could not get mutt to do something similar to pine's multiple folder
  collections. This is quite important for me.

(and pine has some useful features. It is certainly not a very bad mailer.
And you can use an alternative editor ;-)

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir


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