Babylon 5 Unix Shells

This is a list of different Unix shells available on Babylon 5. Please choose your shell carefully, as most of them have unusual qualities.

Compiled from a thread on rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated. I think this was inspired by the fact that ksh sounds a lot like kosh. -Ed

kosh

Keeps giving you queries, like when you try to look up a man page, it says, "Can you help me understand 'man'?"

Every time yo try to execute a file, it rms it with an echo "Permission denied: you are not ready to execute this file."

When you try to check your quota, it comes back, "Never ask this question!"

Whenever you try running 'tail' on a file, it just shoots back, "It will all end in fire."

When you finally do get kosh to start up a process, it dies.

Another problem you might have is getting kosh to shut down. Exit, logoff, Control-D do not work. Opening another window with a different shell and trying to kill it results in:

  sh% kill -9 kosh
  As long as you are here, I will always be here.

zathrash

Answers "This is wrong tool. Never use this." to everything you type.

Do not worry about this however, since nobody ever listens to Zathrash.

londosh

With every command execution you have to listen to a speech about how good the commands were in SYSIII back in the 70s. Then it annexes your disk space.

minbarish

Impossible to install because 99% into the installation it just stops and never gives you an error code.

mordensh

Very powerful and polite, always asks you what you want.

Only problem is that it seems to cause your computer to take up other users' space on the file server.

narnsh

When you enter a command or use some tool to inspect your hard disk, the shell gives this response: "There is something dark in section xxxx. Please look at the man page (8) J'Quan for further information." If you look at sector xxxx after that, you will find a virus file there that you have deleted long ago.

Alternatively, it sometimes prints an error message "Strange things walk in sector xxxx, they must walk alone" after something about ants.

If you install a Miscrosoft product on your computer while its running narnsh, it starts a process called 'natoth -shonkar', which repeatedly prints "Deathwalker!" on the screen and deletes the offending files.

zogsh

You make a lot of frantic requests to it before is actually executes the program in question.

And you need the 150 000 character password just to log in.

And all that time you have to say that Windows NT could do the job.

ivanovash

This shell thinks it is God!

If you type an invalid command, instead of "command not found", you get "..all you had to do was to admit you were wrong and I was right and everything would've been fine"

virsh

Tries to warn the user that a particular command will result in a core dump, but is ignored.

Is aware that it will someday become 'root', after init() dies.

Never boots past run level one, even though there are six levels.

Has been known to create a fake user id and 'chown' thousands of files to be owned by this pseudo-user.

Will not execute the command 'kill -9 narnsh', no matter what you try.

marcush

Is aware of all daemons operating in the system, but does not bother them as long as they don't bother marcush.

When you type 'kill -9 *', marcush is the only process left still running.

With all the other shells available, marcush seems like a waste of disk space, but is included to please the UK users.

sinclairish

Inexplicably disappears and replaces itself with a different shell, only to reappear years later to turn back the system clock and install itself as 'valensh'.

Contributors

drumz@best.com	paras@skymax.lanl.gov
jakeblue@io.com	jdawson@inlink.com
mazevedo@mail.telepac.pt	cptnerd@access.digex.net
gshubina@cs.brandeis.edu	Eric@wolf359.exile.org
csburris@halcyon.com	songbird@pacifier.com

Please mail me if I forgot anyone.

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Last modified: Thu Jan 6 16:19:23 PST 2000