Questions concerning BaSH

[Per Bothner]

melling at cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes:
>I found BASH 1.05 to be very unstable.

I haven't. Very infrequently (less than once a month),
I've noticed it freeze up on me, but generally I have no problems.

>I wouldn't use it as my login shell.

I do on my home Sony (68020, bsd 4.3-based), on my friend's
DECstation3100, and I use it as my main shell (though I haven't
updated /etc/passwd) on my office DEC3100.

>There are several major patches for it that you should be sure
>to get if you decide to use it.

I just have the one patch set from prep (which you should get).

>I might try it again when 1.06 is released.

Version 1.06 is long overdue...

>For now though, I recommend tcsh.

tcsh is ok, but it is a bit of a kludge, and it requires csh
source. Also, I would advise against writing major macros
or programs using [t]csh, given that the Posix standard
(and ksh and bash) are based on Bourne shell syntax.

>BTW:  The BASH binary(like most GNU binaries) is quite large.

It's somewhat big, but not that bad (DEC3100 sizes):

-rwxr-xr-x  1 bothner    360448 Jan 10 12:13 bash*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root       241664 Jun 26  1990 /usr/misc/tcsh*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root       167936 Aug 16 11:24 /usr/misc/ksh*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root       241664 May 23  1990 /usr/bin/csh*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root        45056 Apr  1  1990 /bin/sh*
-- 
	--Per Bothner
bothner at cs.wisc.edu Computer Sciences Dept, U. of Wisconsin-Madison