From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Jan 26 21: 7: 5 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from fedde.littleton.co.us (cfedde.dsl.frii.net [216.17.139.141]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6BE5637B417 for ; Sat, 26 Jan 2002 21:06:46 -0800 (PST) Received: from fedde.littleton.co.us (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by fedde.littleton.co.us (8.11.6/8.11.4) with ESMTP id g0R56i870725; Sat, 26 Jan 2002 22:06:44 -0700 (MST) Message-Id: <200201270506.g0R56i870725@fedde.littleton.co.us> To: Bernie Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: shells confusion In-Reply-To: <20020126020430.P175-100000@BLAST> From: Chris Fedde Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 22:06:44 -0700 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message