Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 09:43:36 +0100 From: Dominic Mitchell <Dom.Mitchell@palmerharvey.co.uk> To: Doug <Doug@gorean.org> Cc: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@flood.ping.uio.no>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What to tell to Linux-centric people?! Message-ID: <19990728094335.D16017@voodoo.pandhm.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9907271250100.1387-100000@dt011n65.san.rr.com>; from Doug on Tue, Jul 27, 1999 at 01:00:17PM -0700 References: <xzp7lnm5v3x.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <Pine.BSF.4.05.9907271250100.1387-100000@dt011n65.san.rr.com>
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On Tue, Jul 27, 1999 at 01:00:17PM -0700, Doug wrote:
> What features specifically do you recommend that we look at other
> than those two, and how do they differ from bash? I'm willing to give
> another shell a look, but "Use this, it's better" isn't a convincing
> argument for me. :)
Extended globbing. eg: less [A-Z]*(.) to view all the README files and
suchlike in a directory, whilst ignoring things like CVS. Another
favorite is "find /sys/*~compile | xargs egrep", which looks in all
kernel source directories except the compile tree.
Programmable completion. Takes a while to set up, but you can't live
without it when you're done. I found it particularly useful for use
with MH commands, and pkg_delete. eg: "show +in<TAB>" -> "show +inbox".
Not only that, but with the menu completion, you just keep hitting tab
until you get what you want. Very lazy, very nice. How about
completion for cd that only looks at directories?
You can get implicit tees and cats with redirection syntax. eg:
"ls -l > file1 > file2".
You can turn off csh-style history easily ("setopt nobanghist"). Very
important!
For new users, if it sees a command beginning with rm and ending in "*",
it asks if you're sure. That's gotta be the number one complaint about
Unix from DOS people.
Autoloaded functions (load on demand is a better description). I know
that ksh and zsh have these, but I don't think bash does.
One thing I find quite useful is that you can extend the "~user" syntax
with your own variables. So, on our web cache machine, I automatically
set "squid=/cacheboy/data01/squid" and I can then do "cd ~squid/logs".
Generally, there are lots of little extensions that make life much
easier. I would reccomend looking at:
http://sunsite.auc.dk/zsh/Intro/index.html
And going through the "tutorial on zsh" as a good introduction to some
of the capabilities. Once you've done that, looking through the
hypertext manual is interesting to see precisely what the extensions
are.
--
Dom Mitchell -- Palmer & Harvey McLane -- Unix Systems Administrator
In Mountain View did Larry Wall
Sedately launch a quiet plea:
That DOS, the ancient system, shall
On boxes pleasureless to all
Run Perl though lack they C.
--
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