Re: Switching from tcsh to bash as an interactive shell

From: Chris F.A. Johnson (cfajohnson_at_gmail.com)
Date: 09/18/04 

Date: 18 Sep 2004 08:15:41 GMT

On 2004-09-18, P.T. Breuer wrote:
> Bruce Barnett <spamhater103+U040917203506@grymoire.com> wrote:
>> ptb@oboe.it.uc3m.es (P.T. Breuer) writes:
>
>> > Indeed it is - it's called interpreting, and it makes debugging (small
>> > things) easy. However, that's not the "command line", that's an
>> > interpreter, and I encourage you to use it.
>
>> There is no reason to write a script if you are going to use it once,
>> and don't need to debug it.
>
> The idea of programming is that you do not continue to write and
> rewrite the same program. I have written programs (i.e. things of
> twenty lines or so) that I have used only once, but only very very
> rarely. Normally I would embed my effort in a permanent piece of text,
> for reuse.
[snip]
> Nor would I want to! I switch to sh if I want to program. Why do you
> pusue these ridiculous red herrings? Can you really not get the idea?

    As you say, "I switch to sh if I want to program." Well, I want
    to program, and everything I type at the command line is a
    program; that's why I don't use tcsh. I don't want to have to go
    into an editor every time I need a one-time, two- to five-line
    program.

    All the commands I type at the command line are stored in the
    history. If I want to find a previous command, I use Ctl-R or
    Ctl-Up (reverse-search-history or history-search-backward),
    depending whether or not the command started with the word I am
    searching for. It's vastly easier than searching through the
    thousands of command files I would have otherwise.

    When the history file gets too big, it is automatically backed up.
    I have a directory of old history files that I can also search for
    old commands.

    When a program becomes too complex for use at the command line,
    but I don't think it warrants its own file, I have a catch-all
    script file. I insert the new program at the beginning, followed
    by a dated separator (a macro does the insertion):

exit
##
## 2004/09/17 22:00:00
##################################################################

    The ability to enter a multi-line command is such a time saver
    that another shell would have to have some incredible features to
    make up for the lack of it.

    When I started using Unix, only sh and csh were available. After a
    couple of weeks, I tried csh. The lack of multi-line capabilities
    sent me running straight back to sh.

    Would I have gone back to sh if it had been tcsh instead of csh? I
    honestly don't know. I had been using a shell with history and
    command-line editing for a few years by that time (it didn't have
    multi-line entry, and it was nowhere near as powerful as sh), so
    it would have been a more difficult choice. I think the multi-line
    entry would have won out. 

-- 
    Chris F.A. Johnson                  http://cfaj.freeshell.org/shell
    ===================================================================
    My code (if any) in this post is copyright 2004, Chris F.A. Johnson
    and may be copied under the terms of the GNU General Public License

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