[LINK] Ease of use and Linux for the Rest of Us

[Craig Sanders]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2002 at 10:45:43AM +1100, Rachel Polanskis wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Nov 2002, Craig Sanders wrote:
> 
> > finally, most unix command shells (e.g bash or zsh) are quite pleasant
> > to use with 500+ lines of command-line history (just hit up-arrow and
> > your previous command is there and can be edited before hitting enter),
> > filename completion and other convenience features.  nothing at all like
> > COMMAND.COM or CMD.EXE in MS-DOS or Windows.
> 
> heh,  I used to have people at a certain university I worked at always
> asking how come I could type so fast.  Of course it was the history and
> completion features of the shell.   Back when I was in DOS-land
> I used to use 4-DOS (remember that?!).

yep, i used to use 4Dos too - an excellent program.  MS-DOS was, IMO,
close to unusable without it.  

COMMAND.COM (and it's successor CMD.EXE) are probably the worst command
shells i've ever had the misfortune of using...i don't think they could
have made it more unpleasant to work with if they tried (sometimes i
suspect that it's deliberate because MS "knows" that users shouldn't be
using the command line at all)

original sh and ksh aren't very pleasant either, but a) they're nowhere
near as bad as COMMAND.COM and b) they partially make up for usability
awkwardness by having good scripting ability.

> which are bit more difficult to setup and KSH although it has the
> completion and so on has it setup rather non-intuitively.  

on solaris boxes (which default to sh or ksh), i just install GNU bash
in /usr/local/bin and set the shell to bash for my 'cas' account, and
remember to run "exec bash" as the very first command when i log in as
'root' (there are differences between bourne sh and bash that can make
it dangerous to change root's shell, could result in broken cron jobs
etc)

in fact, i install most of the GNU tools into /usr/local on solaris
boxes because they are much better than the solaris-provided versions.
i don't touch the original solaris tools, in case there are any cron
jobs, scripts, etc which depend on the exact same (bug-for-bug)
behaviour of the solaris versions.


> Watching "experienced" Oracle DBA's fiddling around in KSH trying to
> change through a long directory path and mistype every second command
> used to bring a frustrated smile to my face, when a little completion
> would've made all the  difference!

aside from the fact that oracle is overkill for 99% of the db jobs i
have to do, the CLI client is one of the main reasons i prefer postgres
to oracle - the psql command line client has excellent history
functions, as good as bash...or better since typing "\e" tells it to
load the previous command into your default text editor and execute it
upon return.  very useful.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>

Fabricati Diem, PVNC.
 -- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch