On Tue, Sep 14, 1999 at 02:21:09PM +0200, Juli-Manel Merino Vidal wrote: > Hi all, > > This is not a question related to debian, but... > Which are the differences between bash and tcsh (instead of scripts > :) ? > > Another question: > tcsh isn't gnu, is it ? >
I used to be an avid tcsh user and now am an avid bash user. These decisions are personal really and a perfect example of a religious war, which I don't want to be involved in but here are my personal reasons for switching: 1) Installation: At the time I had just started a day job where I had accounts on several different machine architectures: HP, AIX, Solaris, etc. Refusing to use ksh, and struggling with trying to install tcsh on all those platforms, I ended up becoming a bash fan because I could install it in about 5 minutes from ftp.gnu.org. Autoconf is your friend. 2) Features: AFAIK, all the features of tcsh are in bash with slight variations which I now prefer. 3) Documentation: The documentation at www.gnu.org is IMO very, very good. 4) Scripting: I think it is a joke that csh is named because its programming is more like C than sh. This is IMO like saying that Arabic is more like Chinese than French - one might be able to find specific example where it is true but it is at best misleading. Almost all scripts I come across are written in sh (for portability reasons) so I see no need to ever fight with csh/tcsh scripting ever again. If I need to do write a tricky script I'll do it in perl. Ok, I done now. :) ksb
