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- Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
- Path: sparky!uunet!ftpbox!motsrd!white!sapphire.rtsg.mot.com!beryl17!yeates
- From: yeates@rtsg.mot.com (Tony J Yeates)
- Subject: Re: tcsh in the future - what should it be like?
- Message-ID: <yeates.711915328@beryl17>
- Keywords: tcsh
- Sender: news@rtsg.mot.com
- Nntp-Posting-Host: beryl17
- Organization: Motorola Inc., Cellular Infrastructure Group
- References: <yeates.711122638@beryl17> <1992Jul14.224856.7768@news.eng.convex.com>
- Distribution: comp.unix.shell
- Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 18:15:28 GMT
- Lines: 63
-
- Tom Christiansen <tchrist@convex.COM> writes:
-
- >From the keyboard of yeates@rtsg.mot.com (Tony J Yeates):
- >: $(command) - `command` (speed)
-
- >Not so much speed, I think, as to clean up the quoting rules and
- >make nesting possible.
-
- I hesitate before putting that in. The Korn book does talk
- only about the simplified quoting, but a ksh "guru" friend,
- who is apparently in regular contact with Mr. Korn told
- me that there was a speed advantage (or may be it was
- just $(< )?. Simplified quoting is one of the main reasons
- that I prefer to write scripts in ksh (despite being a tcsh user).
-
-
- >: $(variablename##pattern)
- >: $(variablename#pattern) - cut specified short/long pattern off of start/end of variable
- >: $(variable%%pattern) (versatile, fast)
- >: $(variable%pattern)
-
- >What's wrong with $var:s/foo/bar/, except that it doesn't deal with regexps?
-
- Regular expressions (actually, are these true regular expressions,
- the normal UNIX regexp rules are not strictly used it seems?)
- is the main use of the pattern matching stuff, in my experience.
- (Other related csh stuff include the head, tail, etc. operators
- that work on paths).
-
- > set bar = $foo:s/d$//:q
-
- Hadn't seen that before.
-
- >Also: currently :s only works with history, not straight variables.
-
-
- >: print - built in replacement for echo (speed, more versatile, more intuitive name?)
-
- >And to grok \escapes, which have no business in echo.
-
- Sorry, don't understand your banter old bean.
-
- >:More commonality with ksh would be an improvement I think (e.g. use the same symbols
- >:shown above, rather than creating new ones, just for the sake of it).
- >:
- >:2) Leave the command line editing alone - its better thank ksh
-
- >Well, last I checked (not 6.0+) the vi mode in ksh was better than tcsh.
-
- Although I'm a vi user, I always use the emacs-editing mode to
- tcsh - its simple, intuitive and quick. I don't like ksh's
- vi mode either.
-
- >Frankly, I think it's hopeless trying to salvage the csh for programming
- >use. I do still prefer tcsh's interactivity to ksh's, however.
-
- I'm not trying to revive csh for scripting, but as it is still used
- - I'd like to see it "fully functional" and as compatible/similar
- to ksh as possible. I fully concur with your last statement - tcsh
- is, when configured "correctly", is hard to beat as an interactive shell.
- I'm very please with it.
- >--tom
-
-