Shell Games

[Mike Jeays]

On Thu, 2004-12-30 at 20:15, John Murphy wrote:
> Mike Jeays <Mike.Jeays at rogers.com> wrote:
> 
> >My personal preference is Bash. It is readily available on most Unixes,
> >and has a good selection of features.  I don't so much like the csh/tcsh
> >family, which have a somewhat different syntax. 
> 
> I particularly like the history mechanism which is enabled for the
> default csh/tcsh with FreeBSD.  The recent usage of any command is
> recalled by typing a few letters and then up arrow.  Bash probably
> can do it too and would have similar 'TAB' file name completion.
> 
> But then - I remember thinking doskey was cool :)

Bash has very similar features.  Most of the shells have borrowed the
good ideas from others, and you can compare this with evolutionary
convergence - good ideas tend to persist and be re-used.  Bash and TCSH
share features for the same reason that fish and dolphins are similar
shapes - it it the best solution to a problem.

Fully agree about DOSKEY - it made the awful Windows command line a
little bit more tolerable.