[K12OSN] IDE if /home is NFS?

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2004-04-02 at 13:13, dahopkins at comcast.net wrote:

> [...]I have also found that sh or bash are not quite compatible or consistent across hardware platforms while tcsh is better behaved in this regard.  
> 
> This isn't exactly a valid justification though and I am completely willing to switch to a different shell.  What would you recommend?

I like scripts to be strictly bourne-sh compatible so they are
portable, and interactive operation to be (almost) exactly the
same as scripted to make it obvious how you can automate
most of what you would type more than once.  The (almost) above
is because you probably want command line recall/edit and
autocompletion features in interactive mode.  Bash and ksh both
provide those and you can ignore their incompatible extensions.
If you need arrays and other advanced programming features you
should probably be using perl or python for scripting anyway.
Bash would be the obvious choice these days since it is likely
to already be included in distributions and available for free
if not.  The real ksh is OK and got a lot of things right before
bash but the real one isn't free and the free one isn't that great.
Both bash and ksh have a lot of individually configurable options
(command line edit mode, etc.) but I'd be interested in any examples
you've seen where they were not backwards-compatible with scripts
using bourne shell syntax.

Since there are a lot of educators on this list, I'd like to know
if anyone has considered making a student's first exposure to
computers be about a 3 day session covering nothing but shell
syntax?  I took a course like that at a Bell Labs center almost
20 years ago and it has been valuable almost every day since,
where almost everything I've learned about GUI operations changes
every time someone writes a new program.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com