While on the subject of Unix languages, Adrian Ives has continued the work of P. J. Taylor with The Shell, a command line shell for QDOS. Given my Unix background, I would say that The Shell is similar in functionality to Unix shells (C, Bourne, T, Korn). The Shell considers commands to be programs to execute and handles command line arguments in the standard way. Pipes are created with the pipe ( | ) symbol, and executing programs in the background (like EXEC) is done with the ampersand ( & ).
Given that ‘grep’ is available from the C68 distribution, ‘wc’ comes with the GNU Text Utilities distribution, and that ‘ls’ is available with The Shell, you can execute the following command line in The Shell:
ls | grep _txt | wc -l
Another nice thing about The Shell is the way it handles directories. It treats level 2 directories as real directories. You can ‘cd’ to a directory, run ‘ls’ and see only those files in the directory. You can also ‘cd /bin’ or ‘cd ../man’. The Shell understands both the MS-DOS and Unix directory slashes.
The Shell also handles files with dots/periods in it (file.txt). So, if you are doing a lot of bringing programs over from other environment and have lots of file with dot extensions, The Shell is handles the files without having to put the files in quotes.
The Shell version 1.10 is available from Adrian Ives web page:
www.angelfire.com/ab/4fac/