What, no csh?

Before POSIX shells became generally available, many people used the C shell as their interactive shell. It has a number of features that were lacking in the Bourne shell, including arithmetic and command history. However, when it comes to writing scripts, it has many drawbacks that are discussed in these three articles:

  1. Top Ten Reasons not to use the C shell
  2. C shell problems
  3. Csh Programming Considered Harmful

Since, as Bruce Barnett says in the first of the above articles, "UNIX was hard enough to learn, and spending months to learn two shells seemed silly", I recommend using a Bourne-type interactive shell, and I specifically recommend bash.

If you need help with a csh problem, try Bruce Barnett's csh page.