[TUHS] Origin of the BSD csh?

David david at kdbarto.org
Tue Jun 28 00:10:37 AEST 2016


> On Jun 26, 2016, at 5:59 PM, tuhs-request at minnie.tuhs.org wrote:
> 
> I detested the CSH syntax.   In order to beat back the CSH proponents at BRL, I added JOB control to the SV  (and later SVR2) Bourne Shell.   Then they beat on me for not having command like editing in (a la TCSH), so I added that.   This shell went out as /bin/sh in the Doug Gwyn SV-on-BSD release so every once and a while over the years I trip across a “Ron shell” usually people who were running Mach-derived things that ran my shell as /bin/sh. 

When porting BSD to new hardware at Celerity (later Floating Point, now part of Sun, oops Oracle) I got ahold of the code that Doug was working on and made the jsh (Job control sh) my shell of choice. Now that Bash does all of those things and almost everything emacs can do, Bash is my shell.

As far as customizing, I’ve got a .cshrc that does nothing more than redirect to a launch of bash if available and /bin/sh if nothing else. And my scripts for logging in are so long a convoluted due to many years of various hardware and software idiosyncratic changes (DG/UX anyone, anyone?) that I’m sure most of it is now useless. And I don’t change it for fear of breaking something.

	David




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