ksh vs csh (was Re: SVR4 /bin/sh BUG)

[Clark O. Morgan]

In article <PD.91Jun19125339 at powys.x.co.uk> pd at x.co.uk (Paul Davey) writes:
>-> crash at ckctpa.UUCP (Frank J. Edwards) writes:
>
>>>Why do *you* use csh?  What are the advantages (please be specific and
>>>objective) of csh over ksh?
>
>Another advantage is that csh is more likely to be present, I work on
>many machines, and like as standard an environment as is practicable.
>
>Also ksh doesn't have the ability to refer to !-5:3 (not that I do
>this very often but !131$ or !132* are very useful.

How true.  Also, csh's "!?" history notation is extremely useful.  I
use ksh every day and hope never again to be forced to use "bare" csh
(command line editing is quite a time saver).  But the absence of the
history features you mentioned (and "!?") is irritating.

Fortunately, there is an alternative.  The GNU shell, bash, supports
both command line and history editing (ala ksh) _and_ the csh history
recall syntax.  Since bash sources are available via FTP, you can place
this shell on every machine you use.  I suspect I will be switching to
bash very soon....
-- 
Clark O. Morgan     morgan at cse.ogi.edu     ...!uunet!ogicse!morgan