File specification regularity (Was: Re: VMS vs. UNIX file system)

[Charles Hedrick]

>Speaking as a 3-year VMS veteran who's been munging about in UNIX for about a
>year now, I find that I prefer VMS file- and directory-specs, because I can
>tell at a glance whether the entity I am ultimately referencing is a file or
>a directory.  In UNIX I have to wait to enter my command and then receive an
>error message to the effect that the entity I referred to was the
>wrong kind.

I'm not sure exactly what kind of problem you are having, but do you
know about the -F argument to ls?  I do "alias ls ls -F" so that I
always get it.  -F causes file names displayed by ls to have / tacked
onto the end if they are directories and * if they are executable.  At
least on our Pyramid this exists in both Berkeley and Sys V versions
of ls.  This is intended to make it clear what kind of object a file
is.  Also, you may find it convenient to use one of the shells that
lets you check for things that match what you've typed so far when you
are in the middle of typing a file name.  ksh and the 4.3 csh do this.