Hamilton C Shell
Originally released in 1988 for OS/2 1.x as a commercially supported clone of the Berkeley C shell alongside 20 other utilities that made using the shell and porting Berkeley C script files to OS/2 easier. The Berkeley C shell is a shell that was originally supplied as an alternative shell for the Berkeley Software Distribution, it had a batch language that was much more C like than what the traditional UNIX shells offered, the original C Shell however uses a slow interpreter for executing its batch files while the Hamilton version actually uses a built in compiler.
The original release for OS/2 1.x allows you to use 64k heaps for command lines and pipes, meaning that you can have command lines considerably longer than the 256 character limit of the CMD.EXE.
Versions
- 1989 1.0
- 1990 1.04
Links & publications
- Tom Yager: OS/2, Unix Style: Hamilton C Shell and MKS OS/2 Toolkit provide Unix-like shells for OS/2 - From Byte magazine Febuary 1990 - In PDF format.
- Scott Richman: Examining the Hamilton C Shell: Unix power for OS/2 - From Dr. Dobb's magazine January 1991 - In PDF format.
License and availability
- Closed source commercial software, the OS/2 version of the Hamilton C Shell was discontinued in 2003, the Windows version is still being sold.
- Original list price in 1990 was 350 USD.