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- From: cccbrian@othello.ucdavis.edu (Brian C Hill)
- Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.questions
- Subject: Re: Bourne Shell Programming Considered Harmful
- Message-ID: <18908@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
- Date: 5 Nov 92 07:49:16 GMT
- References: <1992Nov3.191253*Harald.Eikrem@delab.sintef.no>
- Sender: usenet@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu
- Followup-To: comp.unix.shell
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- Harald.Eikrem@delab.sintef.no writes:
- : ! > The command syntax really sucks, man.
- : !
- : ! But it does _work_, in direct contrast to [t]csh.
- :
- : Now this time, is advocating Bourne Shell part of your plan :>?
- :
- : Well, I'd say it does NOT work very well, especially when having to deal
- : with that Bourne shell DEC has been providing their customers with over the
- : years in Ultrix. Has it been updated at all since 4.2BSD --> Ultrix 1.1?
- :
- : And for you Tom C., same thing goes for Convex Computer.
-
- I have to deal the [t]csh genre another blow. sh executes
- with a stack size of about 'x'. ksh (blows c-shell away in 95% of
- all categories) runs with about 5x. csh (so brain damaged, it can
- never hope to recover - thanks Tom) uses about 6x and tcsh often
- comes in with 12x!!!! Why? This is why:
-
- tcsh does all of this stuff that I maintain a shell simply shouldn't
- do like watching for users. That is an application level task. The spell
- checker is nice, but I don't usually spell 'ls' wrong. Of course, with
- a long command like 'cat' one is bound to make mistakes. tcsh is
- a hack upon a hack. csh was brain damaged and tcsh had to be tweaked
- extra hard to make sure that didn't show it's dark and ugly ancestry
- of csh. Then all of the this wanna-be-conventional-builtin stuff
- was added wherever it was thought to fit best and the result was a
- monster! Even tcsh die-hard admit that it runs slow. sh is the most
- elegant well behaved of the pre-ksh shells, but it still suffers
- from contracting out of basic shell services. You have to call
- awk and sed for everything and in the older versions that must conrtract
- out to /bin/test and /bin/expr for that stuff. ksh88 just runs smooth
- as a whistle and is part of POSIX. I suppose tcsh might become part
- of another standard some day - NEGEX!
-
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- | System Administrator/Programmer BITNET: bchill@ucdavis |
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