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Differences between tcsh in Unix and Linux

N

NaturalChiller

Senior member
Are there many differences between tcsh in Linux and Unix? I'm asking because I have a Linux book with tcsh documentation but I use Sun's at work. Thanks
 
We swap tcsh scripts between Linux and HP-UX and Tru64 and AFAIK they work fine without modification, I would assume Sun is the same.
 
Wasn't it the korn shell (ksh) that had all the weirdness with copyright stuff that caused inconsitances?
 
Originally posted by: drag
Wasn't it the korn shell (ksh) that had all the weirdness with copyright stuff that caused inconsitances?
Click to expand...

IIRC (and I have been drinking, so please correct all statements, unless you want to correct spelling or grammer 😉), ksh was originally AT&T Bell Labs tech and licensed appropriately for them. Eventually Mr. Korn got ksh open sourced (march 1, 2000).

In the meantime (between 1982 and March 1, 2000) pdksh was bourne (I sometimes get punny when I drink! 😛). pdksh is almost ksh compatible, and is probably the ksh that most people are used to using. A simple ^v should tell you if you are using pdksh or not (PD KSH v5.2.14 99/07/13.2 on OpenBSD 3.4).

pdksh appears to be fairly public domain code, with a couple of exceptions. LEGAL from OpenBSD's source: $OpenBSD: LEGAL,v 1.2 2003/07/17 20:59:43 deraadt Exp $

pdksh is provided AS IS, with NO WARRANTY, either expressed or implied.

The vast majority of the code that makes pdksh is in the public domain.
The exceptions are:
sigact.c and sigact.h
[REMOVED]
aclocal.m4
[REMOVED]

That's it. Short and simple.

ksh now falls under the AT&T ast license. Now things get tricky... Clarification would be great by anyone who cares and is willing to do a little research. 🙂

According to gnu.org the AT&T Public License has the following problems:
The AT&T Public License
The AT&T Public License is a non-free license. It has several serious problems:

1. The patent license is voided by any modification, no matter how small, of the pertinent code.
2. You must demand a written agreement when you distribute the sources or patches.
3. It requires notifying AT&T if you distribute a patch.
4. Your license can be terminated through no fault of yours, under section 8/3.
5. It makes compliance with export control laws a condition of the license.
6. Some versions of the license require you to provide support.
7. Some versions of the license say you cannot sell a copy of the software for more than the expense of distribution.


The license has two other obnoxious features:

1. It has a very broad reverse license to AT&T, which goes far beyond the use of your code, even your code modified.
2. It asserts one needs a license from AT&T to make a link to their web site. This is not an immediate practical problem, since the license says it gives permission to make such a link. (Anyway, people shouldn't make links to sites about non-free software.) But such a claim should not be made or propagated.

Unfortunately, I am not 100% sure the ast license that ksh falls under is the same as the AT&T Public License. So please, no flaming of Mr. Korn and friends until this point is clarified (flame me all you want though) 😉. If it is the same license, it is definitely not free and ksh should be ignored. If it is not the same license, the gnu.org people need to write about the ast license. Personally I will ignore it until the license becomes human readable instead of just a lawyer-speak POS. 😉

Finally, a post longer than drag's 😀

Edit: based on the gnu.org anti-AT&T Public License point 4, I believe they are the same license.
 
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