Fascinating.
When I left IBM Research to become a grad student at CMU (1981) the Unix CS was running did not have history in the shell. It had just been introduced in VM/CMS and I loved it. I nagged the sysadmins in the CS department about it, and voila, it appeared shortly thereafter. I presume it was one of the things discussed here ported to the CMU environment.
I remember that I implemented history for the shell in the PERQ, doing some nasty stuff to fit a reasonable history length in the weird Pascal they had, since Pascal didn’t have dynamic strings or real pointers.
Marc
=====
On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 10:59 PM Larry McVoy <
lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 05:08:42PM -0700, Luther Johnson wrote:
> I use csh (tcsh) and bash at the command line, but straight Bourne shell
> language is preferred and recommended by many for shell programming, I used
> to use csh for that and got bitten by all the things that I later
> discovered, those in the know had been warning about for years. Also,
> "bash-isms", syntactic sugary things in bash had led me to use them as a
> crutch, my scripts got simpler and more to the point when I re-wrote them
> for Bourne shell language only. That was my experience. I think we'll always
> have some kind of Bourne shell as the script workhorse, at last in
> Linux/Unix start-up and other blood and guts stuff.
When I was running my engineering team I was strict about Bourne syntax
and features only. I got pushed on like crazy because "bash has this
$GOODNESS whhhhhhhy can't we use it". Because we were supporting our
product on pretty much every unix and if it wasn't HP-UX that had an
ancient /bin/sh, it was AIX or whoever.
Over and over, I won the "straight bourne shell only" battle. So I agree,
if you want /bin/sh to work, Bourne shell for the win.
For a login shell, bash is my shell of choice. It's bloated but I'm
typing this on a 5 year old Lenova X1 Carbon with 16GB of memory and
4 cores and it's fine. It was fine a 133mhz Pentium.