== A Bourne shell irritation I was bitten by this today, so I am going to grump about it. Today's irritation with the Bourne shell is that the following is illegal syntax: > echo hi &; This probably looks peculiar and silly, so let me give a real example that is also illegal: > _for i in *watch; do nohup ./$i >/dev/null 2>&1 _foo & bar & baz & wait_ Speaking for myself, that makes my eyes bleed. I find it much more readable and easier to write: > _foo &; bar &; baz &; wait_ (I think a lot of the eye-bleeding is that '_a & b_' is very similar to the much more common '_a && b_', yet does something radically different.) I have no idea why Bourne decided to be so nit-picky about this aspect of the shell's grammar, but I suspect it mirrors some bit of Algol. (As an aside, I note that the original V7 Bourne shell manpage is a marvel of packing a great deal of information into not much space and being reasonably lucid in the process.)