System V Release 4.0 versus BSD

[Guy Harris]

(More generic UNIX than AMIX-specific.  Presumably, Commodore won't blow
off any of the S5R4 stuff the guy asked for....)

>I recently told a friend that the Amiga 3000 would soon be running AT&T UNIX
>System V Release 4.0, and he said that I would be much better off with a BSD
>release.  I asked why, and he gave me the following summary:

Too bad he didn't check out S5R4.0 first....

>What is wrong with Sys V:
>
>	No finger

See finger(1) in the S5R4 User's Reference Manual.

>	No who

Rubbish - "who" dates back to ancient times, and S5 has always had it. 
Perhaps there's some specific *feature* of "who" to which he's
referring?

>	No what

Rubbish - "what" originally came with SCCS, back in PWB/UNIX 1.0 days or
so; Berkeley created their own, not from AT&T source (not their own
SCCS, they use AT&T-derived source for that, although since it's not
part of 32V they don't distribute it with BSD).

>	ps works funny (and not nearly as well)

"ps" does have different flags, if that's what he means by "works
funny"; dunno what he means by "not nearly as well".  One thing *I*
prefer about the S5 "ps" is that, by default, it shows the processes
running on your terminal, not the processes running with your user ID; I
rarely care about the latter, and, if not asking for all the processes,
usually care about the former.

>	the csh is not supported worth dog dooky

The "csh" in S5R4 is derived from the SunOS 4.1 one, which is derived
from the 4.3BSD one; it's not the crappy ancient one that appears to
come with older S5 releases.

>	stty has not half the options

"stty" has more options in S5R4 than in BSD, including all the nice user
interface stuff such as echoing control characters as ^x rather than as
themselves.  It doesn't have "ltilde", but that's a bit of a crock
anyway.

>	shell scripts execute with the Bourne Shell no matter what
>	the #!<interpreter> line for scripts is not supported

S5R4 supports "#!".  This obviously lets you have your scripts be run by
the Bourne shell, the C shell, the Korn shell, the Bourne-again shell,
"awk", "sed", "perl", "vi", "make", ... if you have them.

>	the csh is crippled (very poor job control)

The S5R4 "csh" - as well as the S5R4 "ksh", *and* the S5R4 Bourne shell
if you run it as "jsh" - supports job control. 

>	the only alternative to the csh is ksh, a worthless hack on sh

Frankly, I think "csh" is a nearly-worthless hack on the V6 shell, and
wish I had the Korn shell (no, "bash" won't cut it until they implement
^O just like in EMACS mode in "ksh"), but to each their own....

>	BSD network niceties are not supported (like telnet)

See ftp(1), telnet(1), rsh(1), rlogin(1), rcp(1), etc. in the S5R4
User's Reference Manual.

>In a nut shell, it sucks.  (Why else does Sun ship BSD?)

Sun doesn't ship BSD, Sun ships SunOS.  SunOS probably has more BSD
stuff in it than S5 stuff, but it has a fair bit of both, as well as a
fair bit of stuff that comes from neither (much of which is in S5R4). 
Yes, I'd miss the BSD stuff if it weren't there; I'd miss a lot of the
S5 stuff, too.

Other vendors ship S5 systems (or systems billed as such) with BSD stuff
added in; AT&T, as of S5R4, is one such vendor (and even as of some
earlier systems, although with less BSD stuff).

>My question is, is he accurate,

Only in some cases.

>and if so, do his criticisms apply to Release 4.0?

Few, if any.