Template talk:Unix shells

Why is the Hamilton C Shell listed? It's a Windows program. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 22:35, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think you've asked a reasonable question. Let me try to respond.

We define Unix shell as "A Unix shell is a command-line interpreter or shell that provides a traditional user interface for the Unix operating system and for Unix-like systems. ... the basic features common to all the Unix shells, including piping, here documents, command substitution, variables, control structures for condition-testing and looping and filename wildcarding." From Unix-like, "There is no standard for defining the term, and some difference of opinion is possible as to the degree to which a given operating system is "Unix-like"."

Hamilton provides a command-line shell interface very similar to that of the Unix C shell and it does include all the basic facilities common to all Unix shells listed above. Yes, it does it only on Windows but the facilities on Windows that it uses (file system operations, process creation, ipc, etc.), the use it makes of them and the functionality it provides are Unix-like. That's sort of the whole point of it. I think that qualifies under our (admittedly vague) definitions.

But also, consider something like Cygwin, which also only runs on Windows (using code ported from Linux). We report in Cygwin#Features that it includes "Shells (i.e. command line interpreters): bash, dash, pdksh, tcsh, zsh". Are those now Windows shells because they've been compiled to run on Windows? Or are they still Unix shells?

For yet another take on why a Unix shell that doesn't run on Unix isn't nearly so illogical a term as it might seem, consider this query. What should that return?

I hope this was helpful. Msnicki (talk) 23:34, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

So we're back at the question what "Unix-like" means, which also plagues the template {{unix}}.

The Cygwin comparison is flawed because Cygwin is explicitly meant to port Unix software to Windows. The shells it supports were developed on Unix and still run there. That's not true of the Hamilton shell, which doesn't run on Unix at all.

But anyway, I won't pursue this further, at least for now, because it's bound to be a waste of time and it was actually quite fun to learn about this shell. I'd never heard of it. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 08:52, 24 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]