Why no job control in 386/ix?

George MacDonald gmd at ubbs-nh.MV.COM
Thu Nov 30 00:40:29 AEST 1989


In article <1989Nov19.180741.8950 at tolerant.com> leach at tolerant.com (Geoffrey Leach) writes:
>From article <3880 at amelia.nas.nasa.gov>, by izen at amelia.nas.nasa.gov (Steven H. Izen):
>> The C-shell which was included with 386/ix (a system V UNIX for 386 boxes)
>> does not support job control.  Is this because
>> 	1) The kernel is missing something required to support it,
>> 	2) ISC was too lazy to implement it, or
>
>You think that ISC's csh is bad, just try the one that ATT ships on their
>version of the 386 software!  Eech!.
>
>My guess at the reason.  Csh is a Berkley development and SystemV people
>don't care for Berkley-isms.  

One reason for the lack of enthusiasm for csh is that the ksh has existed for
over 6 years inside AT&T. FYI the ksh provides all of the csh features in
a slightly different way, plus it is smaller, faster and upwards compatible
with the bourne shell. The biggest plus with the ksh for me is the command
editing is either 'vi' style or 'emacs' style, I can reuse all that I learned
from years of vi useage. Ksh is available for the i386 machines and runs
very well, some vendors are smart enough to include it(Apple for one) in
their distributions. Also ksh is part of Sys V.4 so you will see it sooner
or later 8-). Most people who try it like it, although some heavy csh
users just can't tear themselves away from the ! culture.

>I once complained about the absence of '-r'
>on the System V cp command and was told, in efect, that in that context, '-r'
>was an offence against Decency and the Natural Order of Things.

The argument for "control of -r[R]" goes like this. If we add -r to cp,
then why not chmod, chown, ls ..... ad infinitum. This duplicates a lot
of functionality, and in many cases this is not done right. Better is
to provide this functionality in one place and do it well. Hence,
find, cpio -pdl ... On the otherhand, I also have gotton used to cp -r
or rcp -r and prefer it! I guess pandora box is already open! 



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