Shell Games

[vijayendra gadgil]

On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 00:30:16 -0500 (EST), Tom Huppi <thuppi at huppi.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 31 Dec 2004, Nicolas Mackintosh wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > I've always looked at the shell as a very personal thing. Some will
> > prefer Bash, others will want to play with something completely
> > different. It's a bit like having a favorite hammer... Only a lot more
> > elegant!
> 
> Heh...you have not seen my work then :)
> 
> My two cents, though:  I started out in a multi-platform
> environment and thus choose Bourne Shell for scripting (and still
> had to learn the sed, awk, etc differences since most shells are
> pretty useless alone.)  As time goes by, I suspect it's less of an
> issue even for the few folks who find themselves in such a
> position.  I will mention, though, that knowing Bourne Shell and
> portability issues can come in handy for working with autoconf,
> and that is likely a more common demand these days.
> 
> FWIW, I've always used 'tcsh' interactively, but almost switched a
> while back out of disgust at not being able to figure out how to
> get a one-line foreach/{do_something}/end loop (which would allow
> me to re-run a complex command easily.)

I would recommend 'ksh' it does the tasks of both 'csh' and 'sh' with
advanced programming features, check out http://www.kornshell.com/