[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Marc Donner]

Fascinating.

When I left IBM Research to become a grad student at CMU (1981) the Unix CS
was running did not have history in the shell.  It had just been introduced
in VM/CMS and I loved it.  I nagged the sysadmins in the CS department
about it, and voila, it appeared shortly thereafter.  I presume it was one
of the things discussed here ported to the CMU environment.

I remember that I implemented history for the shell in the PERQ, doing some
nasty stuff to fit a reasonable history length in the weird Pascal they
had, since Pascal didn’t have dynamic strings or real pointers.

Marc
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On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 10:59 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 05:08:42PM -0700, Luther Johnson wrote:
> > I use csh (tcsh) and bash at the command line, but straight Bourne shell
> > language is preferred and recommended by many for shell programming, I
> used
> > to use csh for that and got bitten by all the things that I later
> > discovered, those in the know had been warning about for years. Also,
> > "bash-isms", syntactic sugary things in bash had led me to use them as a
> > crutch, my scripts got simpler and more to the point when I re-wrote them
> > for Bourne shell language only. That was my experience. I think we'll
> always
> > have some kind of Bourne shell as the script workhorse, at last in
> > Linux/Unix start-up and other blood and guts stuff.
>
> When I was running my engineering team I was strict about Bourne syntax
> and features only.  I got pushed on like crazy because "bash has this
> $GOODNESS whhhhhhhy can't we use it".  Because we were supporting our
> product on pretty much every unix and if it wasn't HP-UX that had an
> ancient /bin/sh, it was AIX or whoever.
>
> Over and over, I won the "straight bourne shell only" battle.  So I agree,
> if you want /bin/sh to work, Bourne shell for the win.
>
> For a login shell, bash is my shell of choice.  It's bloated but I'm
> typing this on a 5 year old Lenova X1 Carbon with 16GB of memory and
> 4 cores and it's fine.  It was fine a 133mhz Pentium.
>
-- 
=====
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