Recalling Commands in Unix?

[David C Lawrence]

<5141 at blake.acs.washington.edu> gnat at blake.acs.washington.edu (Laura Frazier):
> Is there any command in Unix comparable to ^B in VMS that will allow
> me to recall previous commands instead of typing them repeatedly?
> Are there likewise commands like ^J , ^A, etc., that will edit
> commands once I recall them?

Um, yes.  "Um" because it isn't technically Unix, but merely an
application written for Unix -- namely, the shell.  Several
interactive shells, most notably bash, tcsh, ksh and ecsh, provide
this functionality.

If you are on an AT & T box (semi-doubtful; University sites tend to
run BSD, but assumption making about what someone is running is just
plain fool-hardy) look into getting ksh from the AT & T Toolchest.  It
supports both Emacs-like and vi-like editing modes.

bash, from the Free Software Foundation and available from many sites
that archive GNU software, is similar to ksh in that it offers Bourne
shell syntax, vi- and Emacs-like modes, and better interactive use
than /bin/sh.  Major sites carrying it for anonymous ftp are
prep.ai.mit.edu and tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (osu-cis for anonymous
UUCP).

tcsh provides a very featureful overlay to csh and also supports
Emacs-like editing.  It too is carried by tut.

I have no idea where ecsh came from or whether it is still supported
by the person responsible for it.  I mention it though because it is
another option I know about.  I used to use it before switching to
tcsh a couple of years ago.  (I now use bash except on the local ACM's
3B2s, on which I use ksh.)

Dave
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