From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 16162 invoked from network); 31 Aug 2002 07:07:31 -0000 Received: from sunsite.dk (130.225.247.90) by ns1.primenet.com.au with SMTP; 31 Aug 2002 07:07:31 -0000 Received: (qmail 8235 invoked by alias); 31 Aug 2002 07:07:19 -0000 Mailing-List: contact zsh-users-help@sunsite.dk; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk X-No-Archive: yes X-Seq: 5323 Received: (qmail 8224 invoked from network); 31 Aug 2002 07:07:18 -0000 From: "Bart Schaefer" Message-Id: <1020831070648.ZM11875@candle.brasslantern.com> Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 07:06:48 +0000 In-Reply-To: <200208310543.g7V5hZe23399@panix3.panix.com> Comments: In reply to Arthur Alinovi "Why zsh?" (Aug 31, 1:43am) References: <200208310543.g7V5hZe23399@panix3.panix.com> X-Mailer: Z-Mail (5.0.0 30July97) To: Arthur Alinovi , zsh-users@sunsite.dk Subject: Re: Why zsh? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii On Aug 31, 1:43am, Arthur Alinovi wrote: } } So far, I'm very impressed by what I see. However, a friend of mine } (who is a bit of a unix wizard) uses tcsh and is curious as to what } zsh can do that tcsh couldn't do if he wrote a 500 line .cshrc file * Execute standard /bin/sh scripts. * Handle ANY signal, not just INT and HUP. * Redirect stderr without redirecting stdout as well. * Parse real semantic control structures (loops, functions, etc.) rather than syntactic sugar that sort of looks like a control structure. [%] And those are just the features common to any Bourne-like shell, such as bash or ksh as well as zsh. How about: * Do real multi-line editing of arbitrary text (not just command lines). * Do floating point arithmetic. (Ok, so you need zsh 4.x for that one.) * Save that 500 line startup file in byte-compiled form so it doesn't need to be parsed again the next time. (Yeah, that's 4.x as well.) I could go on, but there's no way to explain things like multios and process substitutions in two lines of text, and you should have the idea by now. > "zsh is better that tcsh, because..." ... no one has yet had any reason to write a document entitled "Zsh Programming Considered Harmful." http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/ ---------- [%] I quote from : "If the shell's input is not seekable, the shell buffers up input whenever a loop is being read and performs seeks in this internal buffer to accomplish the rereading implied by the loop." -- Bart Schaefer Brass Lantern Enterprises http://www.well.com/user/barts http://www.brasslantern.com Zsh: http://www.zsh.org | PHPerl Project: http://phperl.sourceforge.net