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Date:      Wed, 19 Jul 2000 09:46:36 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        Ben Smithurst <ben@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        "David J. Kanter" <djkanter@northwestern.edu>, FreeBSD questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Is the C-shell (csh) a bad shell?
Message-ID:  <20000719094636.B12072@wantadilla.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <20000719005336.V4668@strontium.scientia.demon.co.uk>
References:  <20000718175345.A95605@localhost.localdomain> <20000719005336.V4668@strontium.scientia.demon.co.uk>

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On Wednesday, 19 July 2000 at  0:53:36 +0100, Ben Smithurst wrote:
> David J. Kanter wrote:
>
>> I'd like to learn a shell fairly well and chose csh because it's in the base
>> FreeBSD system (a little graybeard character) and I found good documentation
>> on it written by William Joy. But I've read some things that it's a "bad"
>> shell.
>
> Most people agree it's bad for programming shell scripts with.  But for
> interactive use, I don't think it's generally agreed that csh is bad.
> Everyone likes different shells for different reasons, of course, and
> this is a bit of a religious topic.  If you want to use csh, great, but
> please don't write any csh scripts! :-)

This is the real point.  Why learn two shells when you can make do
with one?  At some point you'll need to know the a Bourne shell family
member, so why bother learning a csh shell?

Historically, csh became popular because it had command line editing.
Nowadays, csh's command line editing is ridiculously primitive, and
all shells (tcsh included) have much better command line editing, so
this isn't an issue.

Greg
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