On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 8:47 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <[email protected]> wrote:
> You didn't follow the links in the reference section > > https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!msg/net.sources/BC0V7oosT8k/MKNdzEG_c3AJ > > It is hard to rebuild the past before the web. A lot of source code was only > available either on tape delivery, usenet, or UUCP loops. The VAX 11/750 we > had in 1987 at college would usually have a basic BSD installed and then > everything re-compiled to better match the systems eccentricities. And a lot > of that source code was purged after a year or so because 40 meg washtub > disks are expensive and tape lasts forever. > > I remember that all the profs at college had tcsh instead of csh because > before the VAX11/750 with BSD 4.2 they had all been using tops-20 and hated > basic unix lack of features that tcsh gave them. Oh, dear Lord, you're bringing back memories. BSD 4.2 was the first UNIX I admin'ed. And yes, I built tcsh on it to get Emacs style command line editing. When Bash came out with similar features, i switched happily to it because it was more consistent with actual Bourne shell based scripts, and maintaining both sets of scripts with both sets of syntax was a nightmare. Subtle inconsistencies among them were the bane of my existence, and i wanted to slap harshly the admin who changed root's default shell from "/bin/sh" to "/bin/tcsh". The use of such a poerful and flexible default shell as Bash has admittedly made me nervous in the Linux world, so I'm not deeply shocked that it's turned out to have a subtle and critical security flaw. "Inheritance" and parsing of command lines has long been a dangerous and tricky prospect, one that's not aided by attempts to add more and more features. > The link on bash is at > https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!msg/gnu.announce/hvhlR1Vn1P0/NYwp-4_0CaUJ > > > > -- > Stephen J Smoogen. >
