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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Serious brain damage in /bin/sh for FreeBSD 2.1.5 Date: 1 Dec 1996 21:14:26 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 28 Message-ID: <57ssfi$h3q@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <stanbE1M2D2.38I@netcom.com> <329E96C5.41C67EA6@freebsd.org> <32A17168.446B9B3D@freebsd.org> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> wrote: > As to ksh, I think that our /bin/sh doesn't even come close so it's hard > to argue that its author even intended in making "ash" a ksh clone. > More likely this was simple creeping featurism, and I for one wouldn't > argue at all if features like emacs/vi command line and history editing > were ripped right back out again. If I want that kind of comfy > environment, I'll use bash (and I do). /bin/sh should be a lean, mean, > standard by-the-book bourne shell and that's it. Nah, it was merely an attempt to posixize this shell. The added command line editing was rather a side-product of the already existing libedit, i think. (It didn't exist in pre-4.4BSD versions, as in FreeBSD 1.) Alas, libedit is fairly bloated. OTOH, the command-line editing functionality comes _very_ handy in single-user mode or even on a fixit floppy, and that's where you're normally at your own with all that other foobar shells around... Btw., Stan Brown meanwhile wrote me that all of his headaches were solved by testing for $KSH_VERSION (which is also present in the pdksh, as well as of course in the genuine version). -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)