Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 19:23:54 +0100 From: "Carlos J. G. Duarte" <cgd@teleweb.pt> To: John Baldwin <jhb@pike.osd.bsdi.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Is the C-shell (csh) a bad shell? Message-ID: <3975F23A.85267D8B@teleweb.pt> References: <200007182310.QAA55420@pike.osd.bsdi.com>
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John Baldwin wrote: [...] > rather large shortfalls in csh's language, however. It does not support > functions (except perhaps by abusing aliases), and it does not allow the > same amount of flexibility in I/O redirection. However, I rarely find > that I use much of the added flexibility of I/O redirection in sh. For > scripts where I need that or where I need functions, I tend to use sh. > For other scripts I tend to use csh. Perhaps it's my Pascal background > showing through, but I prefer if (foo) then endif to if [ foo ]; then fi. functions for me aren't a great problem, as I don't use it, because some olders sh's, or some systems stock /bin/sh doesn't support them (they put the newer shells as /sbin/sh or /bin/sh, or even have differents /bin/sh and /usr/bin/sh) the redirections, quoting, and other syntax aspects, however, are a real problem. for instance, sometime, on hacking scritps, we might wan't to do: cat<<EOF| http://www..../pub/somedocs/text1.ps http://www..../pub/somedocs/text2.ps EOF while read x; do wget $x done which is very useful, but impossible in csh. as for quoting ,in sh '' quotes everything except ' itself, "" quotes almost everything, except ` $ and \ with csh, you might be prepared to get some weird behavior. there is one thing that csh has, that I miss in sh: goto's! I also use tcsh interactivelly, as I found it not too overloaded (like zsh), but very fast for the features it supports (smart completition, alias, smart history [try '$ lESC-p'] and useful builtin keystrokable functions [try '$ *sh^X*]) But don't script in [t]csh, only in sh, unfortunally, as tcsh is my interactive shell, I was forced to do 3 csh scripts -- this one ( http://cgd.teleweb.pt/login.txt ) is the worst/painful ( check also the cshrc.txt and tcshrc.txt to get the full suite!) -- carlos To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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