[TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view

Steve Nickolas usotsuki at buric.co
Sat Jul 3 09:09:37 AEST 2021


On Fri, 2 Jul 2021, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:

> List readers will have their own views of the paper.  My own is that,
> despite its dark corners, the Bourne shell has served us
> extraordinarily well, and I have been writing in it daily for decades
> without being particularly bothered by the many issues raised by the
> paper's authors.  Having dealt with so-called command shells on
> numerous other operating systems, at least the Unix shells rarely get
> in my way.

I still use the descendent Korn shell most of the time (often in the form 
of bash) on modern systems, and I don't just mean those that are 
Unix-like.  I've found that a lot of times I can build a quick tool using 
bash or ksh93, or use a bash one-liner, and do something that's impossible 
with command.com on DOS or cmd.exe on NT and OS/2.

-uso.


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