stuff

[Byron Rakitzis <byron>]

Ok, let me try to address some of the issues that have come up:

1) backquote will change. I'm working on the code right now. It will work like John
"intuitively" expects it to.

2) I think home directory abbreviations are useless. On the system I administer here,
I keep a directory called /u, with soft links in /u pointing to the real home directory
of a user. e.g.,

; ls -l /u/byron
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root            8 Apr 16 11:53 /u/byron -> /a/byron

The advantage of this is that it is not shell-specific; you can ALWAYS refer to /u/byron/foo
and know that it will work.

Finally, I always make the assignment

h=$home

in my rcrc, so I talk about files like $h/lib/sun4/regexp.o, etc. It's not that many
more characters to type (1 more!), after all. Paul Haahr taught me this trick.

3) A general aside: I knew I was opening a can of worms when I added support for GNU
readline. This position may sound incongruous to you, but I REALLY don't want to be
in the business of supporting rc+readline. My ultimate goal is to write a mux-like
xterm so that I can put all of my command editing into the window system, where it
should be. (score 80 on the Pike-o-meter for Byron!)

Let me say that I am distressed; I don't know how to reconcile my desire for a small
shell with users' desire to use readline. Modifying readline to accept $home or $h
instead of ~ sounds like a good idea, but the LAST thing I want to do is create
a set of rc-specific readline sources.