Re: [MacPerl] A command line shell for the Mac ?

[John W Baxter <jwblist@olympus.net>]

At 9:58 +1000 8/17/99, Charles Cave wrote:
>Has anyone ever written a shell in MacPerl to emulate the Unix shell?
>[My background is Unix]

Apple, released about 1986 and still (a) being developed and (b) being used
within and without Apple.

For whatever reason, MPW uses different names for things than Unix does.
For the most part, the differences can be covered over using command
aliases.  MPW started out as a paid thing (and I did, starting with first
release); it is now free (in the $0 sense).

directory serves for pwd (without a parameter) and cd (with one), for example.

files does the job of ls (including many of the switch options).  And so
on.  (I kept typing fiels, so finally I wrote a shell script which reminded
me "It's files, you idiot" and then passed the switches and parameter(s) on
to files.)

The regular expression syntax is very different...I didn't know the
Unix-based syntax, so that didn't bother me.  The MPW form pretty much does
away with leaning toothpick syndrome (at the cost of a bunch of
option-whatever characters, some of which are used outside regular
expressions as well:  to redirect both standard out and error out to a
single file, one uses the upper case sigma, for example...which makes
sense).

MPW installs itself as a foreign file system (it was pretty much the only
one until CDs arrived)...if one references a file open in a window
(including running make with source files open), one gets the current state
of the file as shown in the window, which is good (one can test what one
sees, whether it was saved or not) and bad (one can crash before saving).

I don't see much need for an attempt to do the job again.

[I hadn't used Unix before getting MPW; I now spend full time <the usual 12
hour days> in Unix, and I still like MPW.]

   --John
--
John W. Baxter, Port Ludow, WA, USA   jwbaxter@olympus.net
I'm trying to think, but nothing happens.

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