Berkeley Unix buffs who have to get to grips with Microsoft Corp’s OS/2 but are in dread of leaving their familiar security blanket can now feel much more at home thanks to a C Shell written by Hamilton Laboratories in Wayland, Massachusetts. The C Shell is an interactive command interface and programming language, primarily used on engineering workstations, which was written at the University of California at Berkeley by Sun Microsystems Inc co-founder Bill Joy. The version done by Douglas Hamilton is based on the BSD4.3 version of C Shell, and includes utilities for OS/2. It is claimed to add functionality – and developer Douglas Hamilton told the Boston Computer Society that he had fixed many of the bugs in the original version. According to Microbytes Daily, it includes fully nestable programming constructs; variables, arrays, built-in operators and functions; a mechanism for recalling and editing previous commands; improved input-output redirection, piping, background execution, and parallel threading; command substitution, aliases, and shell procedures; and filename wildcarding that supports regular expressions. The newswire also reckons that the demonstration showed that the C Shell and utilities operate perceptably faster than OS/2’s command-line processor and utilities. The Hamilton C Shell is $350, and is available now.
