Gripes about /bin/sh AND /bin/csh

Karl Kleinpaste karl at osu-eddie.UUCP
Tue Jun 10 02:10:15 AEST 1986


In article <143 at prairie.UUCP> dan at prairie.UUCP (Daniel M. Frank) writes:
>>	Read the manual.
>>Karl Kleinpaste
>
>   I was one of the people who first tried to deal with Phil's problem
>here, and the one who encouraged him to post some of his questions to
>the net.  I'm not particularly pleased by an arrogant response like this.
>The fact is, that Phil read the manual, and I read the manual, and neither
>of us could find, either in the manual or by experiment, solutions to
>some of the questions for which you only have your smug refrain.

*Sigh.*

I'm sorry if my response appeared to be arrogant.  That was not its
intent.  It was, however, intended to show that a great many questios
of the sort frequently posted to the network can be answered without
resorting to the Usenet.

>   Perhaps we're just another couple stupid PhD students, but the manual
>wasn't a lot of help in this case.  Unix manuals often leave out important
>information on the theory that you can read the source, so what do you
>need a manual for?  We posted to usenet in order to draw on some experience
>that we presume is out there.  If you are so smart, and you have all the
>solutions at your fingertips, why don't you share them instead of demon-
>strating how superior you are (do you really know the solutions?  We
>can't tell, can we?)?

Oh, baloney.  Stop making foolish insinuations.  From what I recall of
the original article, here are my references from csh(1) on what was
confusing the original poster.

Quotation habits: page 4 of csh(1), under the heading Quotations with
' and ".

Aliases: also page 4 of csh(1), under the heading Alias Substitution.

Command substitution: page 6 of csh(1), under the heading Command
Substitution.

Reading other command files: page 14 of csh(1), under the alphabetical
listing of Builtin Commands.  The command in question is `source.'

Note that your page numbers might vary by one or two, depending on
what formatting habits your printers have.

I don't recall anything else just now, and I haven't got the original
article in front of me just now.  Yes, it was in the manual.  All of
it, as nearly as I could see.  I won't attempt to answer the final
full-blown question because what was provided was too sketchy to do
anything in detail without a great deal more info from the original
person.

So my original `refrain' stands: Read the manual.  All of your
questions posted to the network were answered right there.  I honestly
don't know why you couldn't find it yourself in the first place.
-- 
Karl Kleinpaste



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