shells?

[Daniel Pfeiffer]

Gosh, so many shells!  When I started UNIX all we had was Bourne
shell, so I learnt this and dreamed about C shell.  When I finally got
that, it fairly much turned me off, so I stuck with Bourne.  Then came
C Shell, Toronto C shell, Korn shell, Bourne Again shell and I just
read about ash ...

I don't need a huge shell (as in csh's 266240 bytes compared to sh's
102400 which is still a whopper)!  Of course with paging and swapping
it doesn't make a difference, but I just don't _like_ it :-)

I don't need a history or a command line editor, GNU Emacs does that
better than any shell will ever be able to!

Does some shell just provide improvements over Bourne shell.  Given
the amount of code that exists for Bourne shell this should be upwards
compatible.  For example I heard that [ test ] is a built in for ksh.
Does that mean we have we can say (without ;):

if [ test ] then
while [ test ] do

The only things I miss in Bourne shell is a list type or something
like that, so I can get at ${27} or ${$#} for command line args, and
for similar but separate structures of my own.  And it would be nice
if it could do some clever redirection for builtins and functions in
pipelines, rather than fork off a subshell for each one.  Then we
wouldn't have to bend over backwards to set variables, cd and other
things.

--
-- Daniel Pfeiffer				<pfeiffer at cix.cict.fr>
-- Tolosa (Toulouse), Midi-Pyrenees, Europe	<pfeiffer at irit.fr>
-- "Beware - polyglot esperantist"		<pfeiffer at frcict81.bitnet>
--

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