Funny thing happened to me ... Beware of "$_" and the shell you run

[Dave Ihnat]

In article <4038 at uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> richard at uhccux.UUCP (Richard Foulk)
writes:

>Looks like another good reason to stick with csh.  !$ is easier to type
>and it displays the substitution so you know what's going on.
>
>
>Richard Foulk		richard at uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu

You're kidding.  Right?  Tell me you are.  My biggest complaint with 'csh'
was always that you absolutely cannot count on it being on every system you
may write scripts for, and, well, one of Unix's greatest assets was
portability, right?  Also, I don't know about you, but I always found the
history mechanism rather obscure.  It did offer better interactive user
capabilities than the crufty old Bourne shell, but rather than have to change
to Bourne when writing scripts, and 'csh' when interactive, I used 'sh'.

Now, the Korn shell has everything that the old 'csh' could offer, and more;
and it's becoming as widely distributed as the old Bourne shell.  Csh?  It's
still not released to the Public Domain, or verified as pure BSD code, so
you *still* can't count on it's presence when writing scripts, while you *can*
reasonably conditionalize ksh scripts to be easily runnable under Bourne
shells.

I say, csh is history (pun intended); move on to ksh.  The moral of the story
above should be "Looks like another good reason to stick with ksh."

	Dave Ihnat
	Analysts International Corp.
	aicchi!ignatz || ignatz at homebru.chi.il.us