Ksh use (was Re: Should ``csh'' be part of ...)

[bob desinger]

Rob Thurlow (rthurlow at van-bc.UUCP) writes:
> We have four different System V boxes; you'd think one
> of the vendors would give out 'ksh' as a freebie.  Since I'm dreaming,
> why can't it be AT&T, who doesn't even give us 'csh' for some reason?

When it first came out, AT&T didn't know what to do with ksh; that's
why it's in the Toolchest.  Their quandary is not surprising---big
companies have to worry about throwing marketing resources and test
scaffolds and technical writers and all sorts of non-lab people at a
project before they can release it.  It's very expensive for a big
company to release a product; they get sued a lot by unhappy customers
who find bugs.

> Come on guys, this IS 1988; can't I get a computer to remember what I
> typed for me?  Why do they even ship the 3B2 V.2 without a shell which
> can do history?

You *can* get your computer to remember what you typed.  You just have
to pay $2000 more for it.  :-(  Actually, HP ships ksh for free on its
latest releases of HP-UX.  Apple ships ksh with A/UX, from what I
hear.  It's just a matter of time before more vendors---maybe even
AT&T---ship ksh as a matter of course.  Look at the omnipresence of
csh; why should ksh be any different?

> > Does ksh have anything like {}?

I'm surprised that Korn hasn't written a shell function to do this.
(Maybe his book will give us the code.  In his talk, he said that the
new ksh book implements the MH programs in about 700 lines of shell.
MH is about 30,000 lines of C today!)

Okay, ksh hackers, let's implement {} as a function....

-- bd