Re: good book in tcsh shell programming.

[Amos Shapira]

On 10/07/06, Nadav Har'El <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> 2. Interactive use - use whatever you like.

But this leads to what happens in the Technion: people used tcsh because
they liked its interactivity, and this lead them to use tcsh for scripts,
which sucks! So you should pick a shell which is good both for interactivity
and scripting.

OK. You convinced me. I see your point now. I myself used to write
scripts in csh and to shun from /bin/sh because I was more familiar
with csh.

In fact, this issue is related to one of the things I like best about the
Unix philosophy: scripting is just automating what you do interactively.
If you know how to do something interactively, you already know how to
script it - just take the commands and stick them in a file. This is a
far-cry from what happens in the Windows world where there's a huge abyss
between the way you do things interactively (using a mouse) and how you
script them (using VB or COM or whatever).

Agreed.

I understand differently. As I understand, Bourne Shell and Csh were both
created around the same time, independently (the former at Bell Labs, the
latter at Berkeley), to replace Unix's first attempt of shell. They had
completely different designs and emphases, but neither was meant to be
more interactive than the other. Later, as CRT terminals became common

Not as far as I'm aware - csh was writen in Berkenely long after
Bourne shell was writen in Bell Labs and with bourne-shell's inferior
interactive features in mind.

(hey, we're talking ancient history here :-)), both shells were considered
outdated, and replacements were written for both: David Korn of Bell Labs

Again, not as far as I'm aware. "Tcsh" was actually an adoption of
ideas from the "Tenex" project (that's where the "T" came from) on top
of csh, which already had command-line interactive support (e.g.
history substitution and aliases).

designed ksh to replace the Bourne Shell, and in CMU "tcsh" was written
to replace csh. ksh inherited sh's style, and tcsh inherited csh's style,
so most objections many people had for csh scripting remained true also
for tcsh.

True.

I just checked, and in Solaris 5.8, "echo" (a /bin/sh builtin) and "/bin/echo"
both do this:
       $ echo -n hi
       -n hi
       $

With GNU/Linux's /bin/sh+echo or /bin/echo you get
       $ echo -n hi
       hi$

My Linux desktop at work was DOA (Dead On (my) Arrival) this morning
so it's a bit difficult for me to check this - but depending on the
particular distro you test this on - it could be that /bin/sh is
actually a link to bash instead of a "real" /bin/sh.

> >A standard is needed, yes. But the 30 year old Bourne shell is too old...
>
> It's not that old. It was updated since its first introduction.

Where is this update defined?

Can't tell without some digging which I can't do right now.

Cheers.

--Amos

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