Gripes about /bin/sh AND /bin/csh

[Phil Pfeiffer]

Since the first posting, people have explained to me that I was both right and
wrong: right about /bin/csh's metasyntax and file I/O shortcomings, but wrong
about what /bin/sh could and could not do.  I apologize for not studying the
/bin/sh manual more thoroughly the first time;  I might have been quicker
to do this if I hadn't been operating under the misguided assumption that
operating systems don't support multiple incompable command languages, and
hadn't spent so much time on the csh man page and the Joy document.

Many thanks to the people who took time to respond to my query.  The posted
/bin/sh examples for file redirect certainly helped.  A lot of problems, like
creating command files to create command files to create command files, went
away when I gritted my teeth and decided to use both /bin/csh and /bin/sh for
my project.  I still have some direct responses to my posting to digest, which
also look promising, particularly with regard to metacharacter syntax.  Some
of this information deserves to be more than just oral tradition; I'm not
familiar enough with the USENIX community to know whether someone has compiled
some of these idioms into a document.

I have given up on creating "executable variables" in a form acceptable to both
rsh AND csh.  This all started when I tried to prefix commands with a string
named "rsh_prefix" which would evaluate to null or "rsh hostname -l username",
depending on the environment;  I had enough problems trying to quote metachars
and avoid the use of temp files that I gave up and rsh'ed everything, including
local commands.  Any advice that people have on this score would also be
appreciated.

-- 
-- Phil Pfeiffer

...!{harvard,ihnp4,seismo,topaz}!uwvax!pfeiffer
(608) 263-7308