From: davidme@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au (David Meiklejohn)
Subject: Re: Amiga or Messy-DOS
Organization: Qld Dept Primary Industries
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1992 04:57:45 GMT

In article <etxtsg.722261278@solsta-c> etxtsg@solsta.ericsson.se (Thomas Grennefors  TX/DKF) writes:
>
>That's one thing that i haven`t noticed. I never use WB on my amiga if i can
>avoid it. Everything i do i do from a shell. I want full control over what
>i do. The fact that i uses unix at work may have something to do with it.
>And the difference between Amiga in shell and a PC in dos is not that
>great.

WHAT?  Some history, to explain my perspective...

Back in the old days (1986), I used to use the CLI all the time.  WB wasn't
good enough to be worth using extensively.  But, neither was the CLI,
especially compared to the Unix shells I knew, and especially with only one
floppy drive.  So, I tried various PD and shareware shells - there are plenty
out there, I wasn't exactly the only Unix type into Amigas at the time! :-)
The shells kept improving, but I found myself using csh for a couple of years,
then I picked up on sksh, which I still use some of the time.

However, since 2.0 came out, I generally just stick with AmigaShell.  I'll
start sksh when I want to, but I generally don't.  The only thing I miss is
proper piping using "|".  Other than that, we now have a shell with true
residency, aliases, local variables, global environment variables, evaluation
of commands in backticks, "*" as a wildcard, consistent wildcard support
(better than most Unix shells, actually), and even copy and paste with the
mouse (like in an Xterm).

Not only that, but WorkBench is a usable environment in itself.  I use it in
preference to the Shell to launch most programs, and to do a lot of moving,
copying and renaming files.  Sometimes it's easier to point and click,
especially when every file can be accessed and filenames can be dragged like
icons.  Sometimes it's easier to type.  The great thing about the Amiga
environment is that you can have a Shell window open on your WorkBench, and
that's how I generally work.  Even better, you can have several shell windows
open at once, and you can copy and paste text between them - list a directory
in one, then paste a filename from that list into a command line somewhere
else.  It's an environment that never gets in my way, and it really does give
you the best of both worlds.

Now, you're comparing this to DOS?  COMMAND.COM?  Ha, ha!!  Sure, you can get
alternative shells - there's a nice commercial ksh, for example.  Just like
ksh, but you can't background tasks and it doesn't have real pipes, just
temporary files like DOS uses, because it's a front end to MSDOS, which
doesn't multitask.  And, you have to pay for it.  You can do better on a PC -
you can run OS/2, and use shell windows within PWS, and get an Amiga-like
environment.  That's fine.

What promted me to reply was that you said you could see little difference
between an Amiga Shell and DOS (presumably COMMAND.COM) on a PC.  That's just
ludicrous, and someone who uses Unix shells should know better.


>Thomas Grennefors         ! What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?


-- 
David Meiklejohn (also known as davidme@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au)
 - Regional support guy for PC's, Unix, and networks thereof.
 - But I'd rather be using an AMIGA!  Wouldn't you?
Find me in Mareeba, Australia (on the pointy bit in the northeast)