From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Christopher Abbey To: cygwin@cygwin.com Subject: RE: bash: setenv: command not found Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2001 07:42:00 -0000 Message-id: References: <1010208124727.AA47875.SM@nike.INS.CWRU.Edu> X-SW-Source: 2001-02/msg00447.html Today, Chet Ramey wrote: > > > > yes, this is a stupid naming convention, and it's one > > of the things I hate the most about shells... every one > > has a different version, and different syntax. There > > needs to be ONE standard, and I'm sorry to say BASH's > > answer isn't an answer; here csh got it right. > > > > Why do you say that csh is right and bash is wrong? call me crazy but I like orthogonality, and logically named commands. setenv/unsetenv is just more intuitively obvious than export/unset imho. I also appreciate the lack of an = in the assignments, to me at least the construct "export foo=bar" evaluates to "export true" which is illogical. (read that as 'export the result of this assignment'.) This allows a clean distinction between "foo=bar yada" and "setenv foo bar; yada" clearly in the first case foo is only assigned 'locally' whereas in the second its being put into the environment. You only need one "assignment opperator", either = (do it locally) or setenv (globaly) the combination of the two is just confusing and redundant. It's a nit, I know, but it annoys me daily as I have to deal with a half dozen different shells in the course of doing my job. I've chosen to "standardize" on bash as much as possible, and just regret that this one aspect of the shell is so irritating. I've considered writing a shell function to emulate a "sane" environment handler, but haven't yet for fear of what a reliance on that would do to my abilty to quickly hop into a foreign environment and fix something (which I'm called upon to do a LOT of at work). p.s. is it just me, or are others not seeing 100% of the traffic on the list? If you hadn't cc'd me I'd never have seen your reply, or my orignal post for that matter. -- now the forces of openness have a powerful and unexpected new ally - http://ibm.com/linux -- Want to unsubscribe from this list? Check out: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple