[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

Ron Natalie ron at ronnatalie.com
Sun Jan 1 11:51:57 AEST 2023


Berkeley Job Control was implemented in the kernel and originally only 
supported in CSH.    I detested csh, so I figured out how it worked and 
hacked it into a 5(r0) Bourne Shell.    But he time I did that, all the 
other BRL guys were using tcsh and so to counter, I hacked command line 
editing into the 5R2 Bourne shell.


------ Original Message ------
>From "Jon Steinhart" <jon at fourwinds.com>
To tuhs at tuhs.org
Date 12/31/2022 1:49:54 PM
Subject [TUHS] Re: A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

>Ralph Corderoy writes:
>>  Hi Jon,
>>
>>  > > I guess in interactive use most users would only miss one thing:
>>  > > the history & line editing capability?
>>  >
>>  > Job control?
>>
>>  Just as history and line editing were a possible enhancement to the TTY
>>  driver, didn't Pike comment that job control was cooked up in foreign
>>  climes because they couldn't drag out a new TTY window in pixels?
>>
>>  Was something like screen(1)'s ‘Ctrl-A c’ considered in the TTY driver
>>  to spin up another pseudo-TTY rather than suspend the long job with
>>  Ctrl-Z and ‘bg’ it?
>
>My memory is really fuzzy on this.  I recall that job control came along
>with csh which I used until bash.  At the time there were hardly any
>graphics displays used as interactive devices.  I'm talking Berkeley job
>control here; I seem to remember that someone got wedged into System V
>that was awful and unusable.
>
>Jon


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