From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Jul 18 17:16:46 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9CD2E37B62D; Tue, 18 Jul 2000 17:16:39 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@wantadilla.lemis.com) Received: (from grog@localhost) by wantadilla.lemis.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id JAA23825; Wed, 19 Jul 2000 09:46:36 +0930 (CST) (envelope-from grog) Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 09:46:36 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: Ben Smithurst Cc: "David J. Kanter" , FreeBSD questions Subject: Re: Is the C-shell (csh) a bad shell? Message-ID: <20000719094636.B12072@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20000718175345.A95605@localhost.localdomain> <20000719005336.V4668@strontium.scientia.demon.co.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre2i In-Reply-To: <20000719005336.V4668@strontium.scientia.demon.co.uk> Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message