[Info-vax] Unix and DCL shells

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/8/2024 9:21 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2024-01-07, Scott Dorsey <kludge at panix.com> wrote:
>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo at nz.invalid> wrote:
>>> The whole command-line concept on VMS is fundamentally flawed. Notice that
>>> on *nix, the command line is not a single string, it is an array of
>>> strings. This makes it easy to pass special characters that might mean
>>> something to the shell, simply by bypassing the shell.
>>
>> Having made the Unix-to-VMS transition in the late eighties, the two things
>> I really liked about DCL were the handling of wildcards and the ability to
>> use [....] for recursive file paths.  I would love to have those two things
>> in bash.
> 
> Things I would like to see from bash in DCL:
> 
> Filename globbing.

Backwards compatibility will show its ugly head again.

$ define dcl$enable_globbing true

to enable?

foobar *.xyz *.abc

Foreign command expand to:

foobar 1.xyz 2.xyz 3.abc 4.abc ! 4 arguments

CLD expand to:

foobar 1.xyz,2.xyz 3.abc,4.abc ! 2 arguments

Or?

> Tab completion of files/directories with list of matches at each stage.

Would be very nice indeed and should not break anything.

> Ability to edit lines longer than the terminal width.

Ditto.

Even though I believe we usually get a long story about how DCL
and the terminal driver interacts.

> Easy incremental recall of commands (Ctrl-R in bash).
> 
> Synchronised permanent storage of command history across sessions. Supports
> using multiple sessions at the same time and only writes the changes from
> that session to the history file.

I usually just write a COM file if I want to preserve my commands.

But other may like the history you propose.

Arne