Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 19 Jul 2000 23:40:52 +0300
From:      Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>
To:        Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>
Cc:        questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Is the C-shell (csh) a bad shell?
Message-ID:  <20000719234052.A87524@hades.hell.gr>
In-Reply-To: <20000718163411.L13979@fw.wintelcom.net>; from bright@wintelcom.net on Tue, Jul 18, 2000 at 04:34:12PM -0700
References:  <20000718160249.I13979@fw.wintelcom.net> <200007182310.QAA55420@pike.osd.bsdi.com> <20000718163411.L13979@fw.wintelcom.net>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, Jul 18, 2000 at 04:34:12PM -0700, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> 
> The problem is that most scripts grow, and grow, and grow and.. well. :)

Functions can be a tremendous help here, nobody would argue against this,
unless they were totally out of their mind.

> Once you need functions you're SOL, once you need the redirect
> functionality you're SOL, syntax doesn't matter, it's the functionality
> afforded by the shell and csh doesn't cut it.

There are a few good reasons for knowing how to use both shells, though. I
customarily use tcsh for interactive use, because I prefer it personally
from bash.  However, the system boot scripts are written in /bin/sh and I
have always been writing my own scripts in /bin/sh, sed and awk (well, at
least until I found out about perl5).

If I had to choose one of the shells, and only one, I would quite probably
choose /bin/sh and that's pretty much it.  Even for interactive use, I still
fork a copy of bash for commands like:

	tcsh% bash
	bash$ for fname in *.MP3 ;do mv "$fname" "`basename $fname mp3`.mp3" ;done
	bash$ exit

But that is probably because I am more proficient in /bin/sh language than
tcsh, and my bash background shows.

-- 
"The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older.
Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death."
> Pink Floyd, TIME (Dark Side of the Moon)


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20000719234052.A87524>