Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 22:06:44 -0700 From: Chris Fedde <chris@fedde.littleton.co.us> To: Bernie <Bernie_X@myrealbox.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: shells confusion Message-ID: <200201270506.g0R56i870725@fedde.littleton.co.us> In-Reply-To: <20020126020430.P175-100000@BLAST>
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On Sat, 26 Jan 2002 02:18:16 +0200 (EET) Bernie wrote:
+------------------
| i'm a bit confused on which shell to pick from programming.
| also i've been thinking of perl, but for the moment i think
| i've got to learn at least how to do basic shell programming,
| not only to write programs, but also to understand scrips that
| come with the system.
+------------------
When Bill Joy was a grad student at Berkeley he wrote the c-shell as a
replacement for the /bin/sh that came on the tapes from AT&T. It was the
first unix shell to have many of the neat command line features we love
today (command completion, history, command editing, etc) but in an
attempt to make the shell more like the "C" language he missed some of the
more elegant features of the Bourne shell.
Still the C-shell became the favorite of the Berkeley admins and
was made the default shell for root. Since then there has been no
compelling reason to change this default and so, it becomes kind
of a "quaint local custom" for BSD boxes to have csh as root's
shell.
It is possible to program using the c-shell. I used it to write a student
management system at a local community college back in the 80's before I
was enlightened.
An argument giving one side of the issues around using csh as a
programming language can be found in a Usenet news article called
"Csh Programming Considered Harmful" by Tom Christiansen. It is
available at www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot and many
ther places as well.
Of course in these days there are many other shells to choose from. So
these arguments are much less relevent than they were in the early 90's
Good Luck!
--
Chris Fedde
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