[Info-vax] Unix and DCL shells

[Dave Froble]

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.

Don't have a clue what globbing is.  Probably don't want to know anyway.

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

You're discussing something that might be useful on a personal workstation.  Not 
something very useful on a server type of system.

> Ability to edit lines longer than the terminal width.

That is a valid bitch.  The explanation has been that getting into the terminal 
driver is similar to a maze of twisty little passages.

> Easy incremental recall of commands (Ctrl-R in bash).

Not sure what you want Simon?  Doesn't RECALL do it?  Does for me.

> 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.

Ah, see above about personal workstation ...

> Things I would like to see in bash on Linux:
>
> Ctrl-T

Not a problem, don't use Linux, use VMS ...


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