Unix deficiencies/problems

[David Lawrence]

In article <1528 at cmx.npac.syr.edu> gefuchs at skolem.uucp (Gill E. Fuchs) writes:
GEF> well, suppose one types into the read-a-head buffer some 23 commands.
GEF> the commands echo immediately, not later in their appropriate location.
GEF> has anyone found a panacea for that, by the way?

Yes, three shells which I know of all do what you desire (or close to
it; read on).  Shells which emulate an Emacs- or vi-like interface to
the system read their input character at a time.  When a character is
typed that is meant to be visible, it writes it to the display.  So
while your command is being execed by the shell, your type-ahead stdin
is buffered for the shell.  When the shell gets to its stdin reading
loop (after the exec and any miscellaneous shell activities), it
gets all of those characters you typed and proceeds to interpret/
display them as required.  The net effect of this is to have your
typed-ahead command displayed where it belongs after your prompt (with
occasional characters before the prompt depending on unfortunate
timing).  

The reason I said "close to" up there is because a limitation of at
least one of these shells, tcsh, is that you cannot type more than one
command ahead because anything after the first is ignored.  Rather
annoying sometimes, but I like the shell enough otherwise that I can
overlook the shortcoming (but if you want to fix it, Paul, I know a
few people who wouldn't mind. :-).

The other two shells, by the way, are ksh and ecsh.

Dave
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