Background writes in csh

[Joseph Wells]

In article <1990Sep20.185147.14158 at ping.uucp> gorpong at ping.uucp (Gordon C. Galligher) writes:

   In article <1990Sep19.203803.25798 at cs.umn.edu> (Paul Lindner) writes:
   >I've been having a weird problem for the longest time.  I like to use`
   >aliases for my ls command:
   >
   >   alias ls 'ls -FC \!* |more'
   >
   >This works fine, however sometimes it stops both tasks and puts them in 
   >the background, (this is on various Suns using csh and tcsh).  Typing
   >fg restarts the listing.  This is really irritating, typing fg and all.
   >
   >I've also had this problem on the IBM RS/6000.  Except in this case
   >typing fg just hangs the shell.

   More(1) is the problem here.  I have not quite figured it out, but I had a 
   similar problem when my users would type:  history | more and it would do
   the same thing.  When they use history | less  it works every time.

I suspect you're wrong, because there is a known problem with Sun's csh
that causes this problem with pipelines in general.  It's a race condition
during the setup of the pipeline by the csh.  I suspect that less works
because it has a larger executable file and thus takes slightly longer for
SunOS to load.

I don't know about the problem on the IBM RS/6000.

-- 
Joe Wells <jbw at bu.edu>