Should ``csh'' be part of the System V distribution?

Bert Still still at usceast.UUCP
Sun May 15 04:37:19 AEST 1988


Ok, it's been a little while since we had a real good "religious war" here in
comp.unix.wizards, and I have this strange feeling that this might turn into
one of those... however, here we go. (In the classic style of debate.)

WHEREAS a significant number of users on System V based UN*X machines use
	the Berkeley shell (hereafter, ``csh''),

WHEREAS the style of csh more closely resembles the C language (hence the name
	of the shell) than the Bourne or Korn shells, and

WHEREAS many distributors of System V based UN*X provide csh in their standard
	distribution (for example NCR and Hewlett Packard), be it

RESOLVED that csh should be included as a part of System V in the same sense
	that the ``vi'' editor, and TCP/IP have been included.

(The preceding remark was for the benefit of those who enjoy a good debate. I
know that I do. :-)

TRANSLATION:	I have heard several vendors of System V based UN*X state that
		the Berkeley shell is not provided as a part of their
		distribution because they do not perceive a need in the user
		community for csh.

	I would like to see what the people of the net, who use UN*X based
systems on a daily basis, think of this issue. And, since I started this
discussion, I will provide a first round.

	As I'm certain will be obvious, I am in a university environment where
I use both BSD and System V environments (in user and/or systems administrator
roles, on several different machines). Of all of the other users on these
systems (about 50 people), I count only 6 people who actually use the Bourne
shell for most (or all) of their work. Incidentally, as far as I know, no one
uses the Korn shell. (I checked the passwd and accounting files just to be
sure.) While I realize that this may not be typical of all installations, I
believe it is typical of a university environment, and unless I am badly
mistaken the number of UN*X installations at universities outnumbers the
number of commercial installations (note that at the moment I am discounting
the PC market: Xenix, System V/AT, etc. because this is a different market,
but that I am including workstations).

	Anyone out there have an opinion?

						Bert
						still at cs.scarolina.edu
Systems Manager
Math/Stat Computation Center
University of South Carolina



More information about the Comp.unix.questions mailing list