Subject: Re: Help for a Newbie
To: Colin Wood <ender@is.rice.edu>
From: Scott Reynolds <scottr@og.org>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 01/20/1997 23:38:01
On Mon, 20 Jan 1997, Colin Wood wrote:

> Ack!  I wouldn't recommend the Bourne shell for beginners, how nasty! 
> ;-)  The C shell is usually considered to be more friendly for 
> interactive use (although I prefer tcsh, personally).

That all depends on who you ask.  I have a link to a list of many reasons
why one shouldn't even attempt to use it.  However, that's not why I'm
writing this, so I'll get on with it. ;-)

Note that NetBSD's /bin/sh is actually a (mostly?) POSIX-compliant shell,
and as such has command history and several other nice features of modern
shells.  Also, for those on the bleeding edge, NetBSD now has /bin/ksh,
which is in fact a public domain implementation of the popular Korn shell
(pdksh).  I'm not really sure when I last saw a real Bourne shell, quite
honestly.

> This is because whoever is in charge of the files in /etc decided 
> (erroneously, apparently) to change the default console terminal type 
> from vt100 to vt220 in /etc/ttys.

Actually, what happened is that the mac68k ite emulated all of the
relevant vt220 escapes at the time the change was committed.  Somewhat
later a new version of /usr/share/misc/termcap was committed to the tree,
which introduced new vt220 escapes, the most annoying of which I
implemented back in November.

The ite emulates enough vt220 escapes that it would be misleading to say
that it emulates a vt100 (of course, there are vt100 attributes like
"double high" and "double wide" that are not implemented).

> BTW, will this little bug in /etc/ttys get fixed in -current?

It's neither a bug nor a problem in -current.

--scott