Subject: Re: Shells in general
To: NetBSD digest <port-mac68k@netbsd.org>
From: Larry Kollar <Larry.Kollar@arris-i.com>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 10/15/1998 10:15:32
OK, that's enough csh bashing (pun intended). Just STOP IT.
I built csh & awk scripts, to make my employment easier, in
the great long-ago. The only thing that csh lacked was a way
to read files line-by-line, and I simply gave that kind of
thing to the awk scripts anyway. (I was grinding nroff files
in my tech writing job at the time.) One advantage of the
csh/awk hybrid was that it was very easy to turn a script (or
parts of one) into a C program if it got used much & I needed
the speed.
I agree with the other poster who said that nowadays, we
should be using perl to write scripts instead of one of the
myriad shells. Had perl existed in 1983-1985, I probably
would have used it instead of the csh/awk hybrids. Nowadays,
if perl didn't exist I'd probably use ksh for scripting.
Csh doesn't suck, it's just outdated. It was the best thing
going when I did all my computing on Unix. Have some respect
for the aged. I now have MkLinux running on a G3, which set
my account up with bash. It supports the good stuff that
csh does (history etc) and I can get used to the new "alias"
syntax.
Larry