csh vs tcsh

[scottprive at earthlink.net (Scott Prive)]

Yeah, I avoid csh like the plague because it has some "this should work but
doesn't" inconsistencies (which I can't recall at the moment but it was an
annoying bug).

I've heard a lot of folks say they prefer shell scripts because it takes
fewer lines of code than Perl. This is only true of short scripts.

Personally I'm a big fan of Perl (and Python), and if I'm in a hurry I'll
mix in `bash` readpipes within Perl. This isn't as fast to execute as native
Perl -- and it can be less secure than straight Perl - but when then those
concerns don't apply this is a nice way to leverage both languages, and get
the job done.



----- Original Message -----
From: "John Chambers" <jc at trillian.mit.edu>
To: <discuss at Blu.Org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 12:19 PM
Subject: Re: csh vs tcsh


> Derek D. Martin wrote:
> |
> | > And by the way, was is the advantage of using bash then?
> |
> | The advantage to using bash is that it is mostly compatible with the
> | Bourne Shell, and the Korn Shell, and (AFAIK) 100% compatible with the
> | POSIX shell (which is based on the Bourne and Korn shells).  The
> | Bourne shell, or more recently the POSIX shell is the standard shell
> | for system administration.  Knowing it is a Good Thing(tm).  Also,
> | scripting in C shell is generally considered brain-damaged.
>
> There's a good historic irony here.  Bill Joy  apparently  originally
> wrote csh as an improved programming tool, and didn't intend it as an
> interactive shell to replace sh. There have been a number of analyses
> explaining  how  he failed on both goals.  For any number of reasons,
> csh is much more difficult to use as a scripting  language  than  sh.
> But  the  syntax  is  better than sh's for a human typist.  Also, csh
> introduced a history mechanism that turns out to  be  easier  on  the
> human brain than the different one introduced in ksh.  So csh and its
> clones are widely preferred as an interactive shell, even  by  people
> who write their shell scripts for sh or ksh or bash.
>
> Of course, there are now even more people who prefer to use perl, tcl
> or python when the script grows to a dozen lines or so. These are all
> much better programming languages than any of the *sh interpreters.
>
>
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