Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 7/7/83; site rlgvax.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!seismo!rlgvax!guy From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: net.micro Subject: Re: C Shell, Job Control Message-ID: <837@rlgvax.UUCP> Date: Sun, 17-Jul-83 04:47:53 EDT Article-I.D.: rlgvax.837 Posted: Sun Jul 17 04:47:53 1983 Date-Received: Sun, 17-Jul-83 16:57:06 EDT References: mit-eddi.429, <889@burdvax.UUCP>, <3091@utzoo.UUCP> Organization: CCI Office Systems Group, Reston, VA Lines: 39 Somebody from Bell told me that 1) yes, UNIX 6.0 would have job control and 2) yes, it would be different from Berkeley's. One thing he mentioned is that it would not involve any changes to the terminal driver; I don't know if they plan to support suspending the "current" process or, if so, how they plan to do it. As for a shell with the history, aliasing, and job control features of the C shell but upward compatible with the Bourne shell, Dave Korn of Bell Labs gave a talk at Usenix about such a shell which he did. It has: a history mechanism; I believe it has "ed"-style command-line editing, and it also has "vi"-style and "emacs"-style editing a simple alias mechanism, and another mechanism called "functions" which seems (from the VERY brief mention of it) to provide in-line shell scripts - i.e., you could have a function which contained an in-line shell loop. arithmetic built into the shell, and one-dimensional arrays C shell-style job control when it runs under 4.?BSD It also has several new builtins ("print", which is an in-line form of "echo", is one) and an extended version of "read" with prompts and other features permitting "read"s from multiple streams. Now the bad news: so far, it's only available within Bell. Western is considering releasing it; Korn says you should call (919) 697-6530 to talk to the people at Western to urge them to get it out. (He gave his phone number and net path - the latter is ihnp4!mhb5b!dgk.) He wants to see it released, as I'm sure those of us who might want some of the C shell's functionality but dislike the C shell's way of providing it (or who just dislike having to deal with two shells) would. Guy Harris {seismo,mcnc,we13,brl-bmd,allegra}!rlgvax!guy