Subject: Re: Packages for NetBSD (Was: Why are there two 4.4BSD dev. groups)
To: Simon J. Gerraty <sjg@zen.void.oz.au>
From: David Brownlee <D.K.Brownlee@city.ac.uk>
List: current-users
Date: 01/09/1995 12:54:26
I withdraw any comments about bash (I dont use it - I was just
trying to give anotehr example of 'tcsh' & friends).
But my original comment still stands for 'tcsh' (I think!:)
D.K.Brownlee@city.ac.uk (MIME). Network Analyst. Postmaster. Hostmaster.
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On Mon, 9 Jan 1995, Simon J. Gerraty wrote:
> David Brownlee writes:
> > a) perl, tcsh, bash - Perl is just so useful to be able to depend
> > on having on a system for scripts etc. And I guess everyone
> > who knows about them will pull down tcsh/bash or similar and
> > install them for the extra features. How feasible would it be
> > to replace sh & csh with bash & tcsh? Or at least have them
>
> Nope, never...
>
> As one who makes a living writing shell scripts (among other things)
> to run on multiple platforms (ah, lets see, NetBSD, SunOS 4.x, HP-UX,
> Solaris, UTS, SysVr[34]... you get the idea) nothing irks me more than
> systems that don't have standard shells.
>
> While I maintained the pd-ksh for quite a few years, _I_ never write
> shell scripts for anything but the bourne shell. And didn't I just
> love having to re-write a bunch of stuff to be ksh compatible because
> HPsUX's /bin/sh is about SysVr2 vintage and still has all the
> bugs... and /bin/ksh was the only shell they have that works.
>
> If it can't be done easily in bourne shell/sed/awk etc, I use perl.
>
> All I'm saying is, by all means have /bin/{bash,zsh,tcsh,ksh} etc but
> leave /bin/sh as it is.
>
> BTW I think you'll find that by the time they've finished POSIXizing
> /bin/sh it will be _almost_ the Korn shell, so you'll have history,
> command line editing etc etc.
>
> --sjg
>