CompuServe Messages

On my system at work we can also use up/down arrows to scroll through previous commands and the left right arrows to edit the line, the cursor can be anywhere on the line when you push return to invoke the line. Also something really nice is that you can type in a few characters, push control-F (FIND) and the shell will search backwards through the list for previous commands that start with those characters. Repeated CTRL-F's retrieve each matching command in reverse sequence. Also command lines can be up to 1024 characters long and they scroll back and forth as you type on a single horizontal line, they don't wrap like they do on the Amiga which I find particularly ugly. Also environment variables (Wicat calls them logical names) can appear anywhere on the command line and they are translated by the shell before the command is invoked. Logical names may in turn translate into other logical names that require translation, ad infinitum. Also something joe kaisler and I and others were talking about is the horrible mess that CLI has with I/O redirection, i.e. each program does it itself. instead of the shell doing it, the shell should scan the command line after all translations and set up the I/O direction itself and then take the I/O redirections OFF of the command line so that the users program does not even see them, the way Unix does. AmigaDos utilities look like they were written by 20 different people, they all want something different and work differently. It will probably be up to the shell to clean this mess up.