Tony Wyatt wrote:
Hi Ole-Egil,
On 17/01/2005, you wrote:
Had I noticed you WERE downloading (you didn't show up in the uplink usage at all, what with your puny downlink and all :-P ) I woulda waited :-)
LOL. My bandwidth was probably in the noise, anyway.
Now, how about giving us Linux-ignorants a brief rundown on the variations in Shells, and why they seem to have different functionality? Is there any one that has ALL the functionality of the others?
They're all slightly different ways to accomplish (mostly) the same thing. In the *nix world, shells are significantly more evolved than the Windows CLI for example, and can be used for sem-trivial to not so trivial programming (think along the lines of ARexx but syntactically different).
The problem is each shell features it's own idiosycracies, and some differing syntax for control structures and tests (for/while loops, if, case etc), as well as different 'builtins'- a shell builtin is most analogous to a C function that is always available (ie, not implemented via an external library).
csh specifically has gotten a lot of flak in the past as it has some issues with file descriptor redirection for stdin (normally keyboard), stdout and stderr handling, or lack thereof, as well as some other issues which may or may not have been corrected in the various different versions available nowadays.
Unfortunately, where there are many options available, what generally is done is you write shell scripts to the lowest common denominator- while not all *nix systems have csh, or ksh, available, they all have an implementation of 'sh' (Bourne shell) available....which is what most 'sane' non platform specific shell scripts are written to. The next most common is becoming 'bash' (Bourne Again SHell), which has become popular being the standard Linux shell...but also offering fully compliant (well, mostly) sh functionality as well.
Anwyays...I was hoping that there wasn't a 'real' (meaning actually using csh specific functionality) requirement for csh, but it seems we've got a few csh variants available, so will presumably use one of them, ignoring the fact that 'csh is just wrong' ;-) (poor choice from Sun/StarOffice that I'm sure has just been left alone...Sun can write some _large_ shell scripts!)
If we wind up needing to create any AOS specific shell scripts, I'd suggest we at least try to write those using sh compliance rather than csh specific...
Scott
cheers
Openoffice-os4 mailing list Openoffice-os4@samfundet.no https://lists.samfundet.no/mailman/listinfo/openoffice-os4