On Tue, 13 Oct 1998, Ken Nakata wrote:

> Steve Revilak wrote:

> > I've always used csh or it's variant, tcsh.  Why?  NetBSD was my first
> > exposure to unix, not quite a year ago.  My initial logins were as root,
> > whose shell was set to /csh by default.  By the time I was able to set
> > myself up as a user account for myself...I used csh just for the reason
> > that I was used to it, moving to tcsh because it offered improvements.

Try bash. It's a Bourne-type shell that supports some csh-isms, not
that I use them much any more. It can also be compiled to support some
ksh-isms, not that I would know much about that. Bash also has some
neat features for writing scripts, such as it can use a pipeline as
the test in a conditional.

> Yes, this is exactly why I'm against shipping csh in the first place. 
> Had you not been exposed to csh in the first place, you'd never have got
> used to it.  Therefore you'd never even dreamt of writing csh scripts
> (not that you are in fact writing scripts in csh).  I suspect most csh
> scripts are written by people who've never used Bourne sh, who've never
> been told that writing scripts in csh is a bad idea.

That reminds me of trying to explain what's wrong with DOS to someone
who's never used anything else.

> BTW: Yeah, I think csh sucks, but "we shouldn't ship csh with NetBSD"
> was just a half serious.  I regret it didn't come across as such.  My
> sense of humor leaves a lot to be desired, eh?

Indeed, csh really sucks. The main reason I still keep it as root's
login shell is so that I won't be tempted to stay in root's login shell!