line-editing and history (was: Questions concerning BaSH)

[Alex Martelli]

melling at cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes:
:I found BASH 1.05 to be very unstable.  I wouldn't use it as my login
:shell.  There are several major patches for it that you should be sure
:to get if you decide to use it.  I might try it again when 1.06 is
:released.  For now though, I recommend tcsh.

I've been using bash here at home for months with no crashes, just
occasional glitches.

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

The funny thing is that MOST of the size is in the readline()
stuff!  It's a goodly subset of emacs, so powerful and flexible.
For my ("MASH") mods to Almquist's ash, I first tried adopting
GNU's readline()/history(), but that more than tripled the shell
binary's size, and I don't *really* need all that power - so I
replaced it with a hard-coded (very complete) vi-one-line editor,
redid history() [without the nice but code-costly csh-history stuff],
and now mash fits comfortably in Coherent's 64K+64K memory model.

If you are able on your system to stash readline() away into a
shared library, and run several GNU (or yours) binaries using it,
that would be a nice solution indeed; not as nice as having the
editing done outside of the applications, as in atty or cled, but,
alas, I never was able to make one of these work for me (maybe it
would be easier if I knew all the magic of Streams? but I don't...).

-- 
Alex Martelli - (home snailmail:) v. Barontini 27, 40138 Bologna, ITALIA
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