want shell should I learn 14

That's the way I remember it and I see no evidence to the contrary. Do you want me to google?

Uh ... I see that solaris 1. appears to have been sunOs 4.1

The operating system component of Solaris 1.x is SunOS 4.1.x.

and since I remember the changeover to solaris from sunOS, that would probably put me as using sunOS 3.x ... or even 2.9? SunOS dats from late 82 ..

Later in 1982 Sun provided a customized 4.1BSD UNIX called SunOS as an operating system for its workstations. Up through version 4.1.x (Solaris 1.x), SunOS remained a heavily BSD-influenced Unix implementation.

I would probably have had the first sunOS to offer a sysv style as well as a bsd style install, in 86-87. Solaris was not introduced until early 90s. I suspect that I had late 2.x or early 3.x sunOS.

So kindly let me know about the system scripts there.

Because you don't have a helpful editor and you can't leave comments and you have great difficulty reusing your program hen it is finished. Not to mention that debugging is awkward (because you can't comment stuff out). You know perfectly well that you can't write a serious program "on the fly". There would be a bug every three lines and you would change your mind completely every 20 lines.

It's exactly as easy one or the other, with the difference that you get to use a real editor on a script, and leave comments, and reuse your script. You must be talking about 5-liners at most. And any time you really want to use a shell to debug with via interpretation, you keep the program in a script and pste it onto the interpreter window to try it out.

I hadn't noticed they do formatting, colouring, and mark the scope of parens and braces? Or have you stopped believing in using an editor to do editing?

I had to teach a colleague to write his papers using vi and not ed when I arrived at oxford ... it was all the same to him, as he only looked at one line at a time. But I couldn't see what his paper looked like that way!

Peter