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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
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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