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
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