> 1) Are shells geared toward specific tasks?... such as program creation, a > shell built to specifically offer enhanced compiling and program > generation capabilities? another perhaps for graphics of some sort?
Not particularly. sh was the original Bourne shell; I think it was the first of the shells to come with a full programming language. Unfortunately, traditional sh isn't too kind on the interactive user, so Berkeley decided to fix this. Unfortunately, they threw out the language, too, and the result was csh, which is somewhat nicer for interactive work but an exceptionally poor choice for scripts (due to bugs, design decisions, etc.) The later model shells, tcsh and bash, are actually fairly close to each other. Bash included all of the interactive niceties from csh and more in an sh frame (which is what Berkeley should've done in the first place, IMHO), and tcsh fixes several of the traditional csh bugs. I still think bash is a better shell to use, but then I don't believe in csh and derivatives. A relatively new shell, zsh, promises the best of both worlds; it accepts traditional sh syntax, quite a bit of csh, and has some very nice features on the side. So basically you have something like a dozen shells running around that all do the same thing. -- Graham Hughes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> MIME OK, PGP preferred from stddisclaim import footer pgp_fingerprint = "E9 B7 5F A0 F8 88 9E 1E 7C 62 D9 88 E1 03 29 5B"
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