

System administration with scsh (Scheme shell) - gnosis
http://www.theillien.com/Sys_Admin_v12/html/v11/i01/a2.htm

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jbester
Any reference to SCSH should make note of Olin Shiver's infamous
acknowledgements page in the manual.

<http://www.scsh.net/docu/html/man.html>

The story goes: while Olin was working on his doctorate he had the idea to
create an anti-acknowledgements page within his thesis. While the typical
acknowledgements page covers those who gave lover and support during the
author's effort. This page would be dedicated to everyone he got his degree
despite of their efforts/encouragements. He, eventually, was talked out of
this. Later, this idea re-emerged while at MIT's AI lab and ended up in the
SCSH manual. It's definitely worth a read if you want a laugh.

~~~
tjr
See also: [http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/advisor-stmt-
original.tx...](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/advisor-stmt-original.txt)

~~~
pwpwp
See also: <http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html>

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dhess
I make fairly heavy use of scsh. At least half of the sysadmin scripts and
utilities I've written over the past 5 years are scsh programs. However, it
does have its problems:

[http://www.lysium.de/blog/index.php?/archives/215-Why-I-
dont...](http://www.lysium.de/blog/index.php?/archives/215-Why-I-dont-use-
scsh-as-a-scripting-language-anymore.html)

Also, I wish it were still maintained.

Despite the problems, I love using it.

~~~
gnosis
Thanks for the very informative article. It's sad that there's not enough
interest in scsh for anyone to have bothered fixing these warts in 17 years.

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jeffd
Olin, Roderic, and myself are working on the next major release of scsh. This
next version has things like 64-bit support, r6rs support, all done on top of
scheme48 1.9. We hope to ship it in the next few months.

If you're interested in participating or testing, head on over to
<http://code.google.com/p/scsh/>

In addition to updating scsh, we're also working on getting MIT Scheme's Edwin
editor to run on top of it. Which is over at
<https://github.com/scheme/edwin48>

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koenigdavidmj
>[Scheme] is a stripped-down version of Common Lisp.

>Using cdr on a list creates a temporary copy of the list in memory with the
first item removed.

Argh, this is painful to read.

~~~
timezra
Considering that the author is in high school, I found the tutorial rather
good. Perhaps if you sent your corrections and suggestions to the author, he
would appreciate your insight and make the appropriate corrections.

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gpapilion
>This example is a bit larger than the sh script, but it is >certainly more
readable.

I tend to disagree with the author on this point.

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cagenut
this isn't system administration, its syntax puzzle play that just happens to
be on a console

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adestefan
I miss Sys Admin magazine.

