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shell versions
Posted by: ChristTrekker on 2012-02-16 06:32:38
I came across http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/shells/ again recently, and it got me wondering what versions the shells available in A/UX are. I know /bin/sh is badly broken, and I always replace mine with a symlink to /bin/ksh instead.

Posted by: ClassicHasClass on 2012-02-16 14:41:08
I'm pretty sure I installed tcsh on mine (if I haven't, I will). I blame my University of California education. BSD) << weird smilie

Posted by: ChristTrekker on 2012-02-17 07:05:46
I like BSD. But *csh is a sucky shell.

Posted by: ClassicHasClass on 2012-02-17 07:48:36
You just don't know what a good shell is. :approve:

Posted by: ChristTrekker on 2012-02-17 09:32:04
Csh Programming Considered Harmful. 'Nuff said. 😉

My point gets at, why should I learn one shell to use interactively and another to program with? There are several good programming shells with nice interactive features - or good interactive shells that work well for programming too, depending how you want to look at it. I'll use bash, ksh93, mksh, zsh, etc.

If you never program in shell, it's a moot point, so go ahead and use *csh. But IMO this relegates *csh to the position of a novice's shell, because it seems natural to me that advanced users will have reason to dabble in scripting at some point, and why would they want to learn something all over again if they could use something they'd already otherwise know?

Posted by: bbraun on 2012-02-17 09:49:48
FWIW, I seem to have built bash3 at some point for A/UX, binaries here

I haven't fired up my A/UX machine in a while, and I can't remember whether it had proper signal handling, job handling, and whether it was built with readline functionality. It should have been enough to handle autoconf scripts though. Using bash with it's builtins is usually both faster and more reliable for running autoconf and gnulibtool scripts than the default /bin/sh on A/UX in my experience.

Also, get it while you can, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with all that stuff when iDisk goes away...

I used to use tcsh religiously, but about a decade ago I had to spend more time than I wanted fixing bugs in its interrupt handling code. After spending enough time to familiarize myself with its internals, I decided it was time to move away. An unknown evil is sometimes preferable to a known evil, I guess. 🙂

Posted by: ChristTrekker on 2012-02-17 11:09:25
I'll try to grab all that stuff so I can mirror it somehow.

I think we're drifting from the original subject, though. I was curious if anyone knew what versions A/UX's default supplied shells (/bin/sh, /bin/ksh, /bin/csh) are.

Posted by: bbraun on 2012-02-17 11:26:22
Ah, sorry, I thought you wanted to know what was available, not necessarily just what came by default. Sorry about that.

Posted by: ClassicHasClass on 2012-02-17 16:35:17
I don't think they *were* versioned. I don't think ... I'll boot the IIci into A/UX later and look.

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