Why csh still wins (was Re: Thank you, Bill Joy!)

[Arturo Perez Ext.]

>From article <2910 at dunkshot.mips.COM>, by dce at mips.COM (David Elliott):
> In article <2323 at munnari.oz> kre at munnari.oz (Robert Elz) writes:
>>In article <2402 at rtech.rtech.com>, daveb at llama.rtech.UUCP (Dave Brower) writes:
>>> [Quotes:] >% mkdir {man,cat}{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8}
>>> This is the single, lonesome, only thing that I like about csh that
>>> isn't done adequately or better in ksh or the BRL sh.
>>
>>It is an important one, but !$ is just as important.  I have never used
>>a BRL sh, but ksh's $_ (while useful itself sometimes), just doesn't come
>>close.
> ....
>>neither of which will do anything like what you want if you replace
>>csh with ksh and !$ with $_
> 
> I'm not sure I understand what the problem is.  All the csh people
> are saying "we like some of the csh features", and the ksh people
> keep saying "you don't need them".  This kind of attitude is what is
> going to keep ksh from supplanting csh in the near future.
> 

Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought the main reason people
continued to use the C shell is because it has job control.  I don't
have access to a ksh so I don't know anything about it, really.

Speaking for myself, the only reason I don't use the Bourne shell
is because it doesn't have job control.  I've seen an implementation
of a history mechanism in the Bourne shell in a SCRIPT!  The Bourne
shell's syntax is cleaner and new 'mantras' of shell programming
tricks can be deduced from the logic of the shell language structure.
As I understand it the Korn shell is basically a cleanup of the
Bourne shell with an optional job control feature and added math
builtins.


I must admit. I have NEVER been able to really use the Cshell
in any meaningful manner in terms of scripts.  The Bourne shells
intuitive language structure wins for me every time.  Really, why
should I have to worry about where I put the space in the "set"
command?

I was never so amazed as when I needed a double evaluation and
tried the logically obvious command

	'ls -l \`which man\``

(actual commands changed to protect the guilty :-)  AND IT WORKED.

How likely is that under the C shell?


Arturo Perez
ComputerVision, a division of Prime
primerd!cvbnet!aperez
The difference between genius and idiocy is that genius has its limits.