csh quoting weirdness under Ultrix 4.1

[Jim Hudgens]

Um.  I hate to followup my own post, but some of the \377's in the
file I posted were actually single characters, and not the 4 character
representation it should have been.  They got eaten by news,
apparently.  My apologies.  Because of my previous post really made no
sense unless you tried it yourself.  This is a corrected version:
-----
Someone here was showing me something I thought was fairly wierd,
which pertains to Ultrix 4.1 on decstation 5000.  It's related to
the older problem of Ultrix 3.1 csh, which involves (maybe among
other things) doubly quoted strings and backquoted strings on the 
same command line:

(All this done in an emacs shell buffer).

----
vax-Ultrix3.1> set echo verbose
vax-Ultrix3.1> echo "foo" `date`
echo "foo" `date`
echo \377f\377o\377o `date`
date
\377f\377o\377o Wed Mar 6 15:27:44 EST 1991

----
On the DS5000, apparently this problem is fixed, though 
the following may make you wonder:
---

decstation5000-Ultrix4.1> echo "foo" `date`
foo Wed Mar 6 15:28:28 EST 1991
decstation5000-Ultrix4.1> set echo verbose
decstation5000-Ultrix4.1> echo "foo" `date`
echo "foo" `date`
echo "foo" `date`
echo \377f\377o\377o `date`
date
foo Wed Mar 6 15:24:15 EST 1991

---
Hmmm.

This is what a co-worker showed to me, that prompted 
all of this (and the above weirdness).  I'm not sure what 
to make of this.
---

decstation5000-Ultrix4.1> set echo verbose
decstation5000-Ultrix4.1> alias dif2 'diff `ls -t "\!*"*|head -2`'
alias dif2 'diff `ls -t "!*"*|head -2`' 
alias dif2 \377d\377i\377f\377f\377 \377`\377l\377s\377 \377-\377t\377 \377"\377!\377*\377"\377*\377|\377h\377e\377a\377d\377 \377-\3772\377`
decstation5000-Ultrix4.1> dif2 foo
dif2 foo
dif2 foo 
No match.
head -2
diff
diff: two filename arguments required

----
The same alias works on a Sun, running 4.1.
----

sun4-sunos4.1> set echo verbose
sun4-sunos4.1> alias dif2 'diff `ls -t "\!*"*|head -2`'
alias dif2 'diff `ls -t "!*"*|head -2`'
alias dif2 diff `ls -t "!*"*|head -2`
sun4-sunos4.1> dif2 foo
dif2 foo
ls -t foo foo.1 foo.2 foo1 foo2
head -2
diff foo.2 foo.1
sun4-sunos4.1>

----

JHH
--

Jim Hudgens		Supercomputer Computations Research Institute
hudgens at sun13.scri.fsu.edu