UNIX Futures

[K. Richard Magill]

In article <2864 at amdahl.UUCP> andrew at amdahl.UUCP (Andrew Sharpe) writes:
>In article <67 at cstvax.UUCP>, scott at cstvax.UUCP (Scott Larnach) writes:
>> The one and only real thing which bugs me about system V is the
>> total lack of job control.
>Uhh, excuse me, but what about shell layers ( shl ) ? It does not
>give you job control, per se, but it does allow you to break out
>of a foreground process, to 'do something else'.

Aside from the fact that sxt requires kernal support that not all SYSV
machines have, *something else*, indeed. So long as you have ksh, whose
sxt job control crashes machines, running under shl so that you can
read a new .*rc file to give you the same? environment you left
especially resetting terminal characteristics *AND* you don't really
want to background anything *AND* you don't mind a maximum number of
processes *AND* you don't mind several processes on your screen at a
time (this is most fun when each sxt has different stty params),
*T*H*E*N* shl is a fair surrogate for "real" job control. You still
can't stop & restart a process.  ALSO, shl cannot be started under shl
nor can shl be used as a login shell.  I put shl in my .profile & use
ksh as shell for nearly everything that will take it immediately on a
3b2 and ksh alone on a 7300.  Given a choice, I prefer ksh on 4.x.

K. Richard Magill