Shell programming style -- a plea for better shell scripts

[stan at teltone.UUCP]

> From: mce at teldata.UUCP (Brian McElhinney)
>
> *Sigh*  I agree that sh is much more portable, but reading sh scripts
> is painful...  "case" and "esac"???  UNIX supports C, a standard UNIX
> shell should at least resemble C.  I never have understood why the Bourne
> shell looks like Algol.  (Not that I think a change is possible, just that
> this is one more reason UNIX is not easily accepted)

Instead of  case ... in ... esac you can do

case X
{
  X)
  .
  .
}

You can also replace the   for .. [ in ... ]  do  ... done
with   for .. [ in ... ]  {  ... }.
This doesn't work for the while loop though (darn!).

This works on 4.1bsd and Venix Bourne shells, but I don't know how
portable it is to other versions.