csh vs sh (was: fixing rm *)

[Dan Jacobson]

[Originally I planed to respond to John Richardson's e-mail by e-mail,
but I thought I might share my golden keystrokes with the community.]

I use tcsh (Ohio-state's) and ksh for interactive work, sh for scripts.

Doesn't the Geneva Convention say you must provide your users with
shells with command line editing (e.g. a la emacs)?  I turn in fright
when faced with the prospect of typing into csh or sh for interactive
work without the protection of at least a (GNU) emacs shell window,
lest I make a typo and have to type the whole line over.

Csh's "!" history substitutions are a lot of cruft to me, now that
command line editing shells are available.  Try "set histchars" to
turn it off.

Tcsh is quite flexible.  You can define each key individually.  In ksh
I believe you choose between the (given) emacs or vi, etc. key
definition sets.  Tcsh also has one touch file and command name
expansion; ksh file name expansion is hardwired(?) to ESC * .

The tcsh prompt I give to all new accounts is packed with info: time,
1 letter hostname and current directory are achieved with:
	set prompt="%S%t `/bin/expr $HOST : '\(.\)'`:%c>%s "
which gives:
	10:57pm g:~>       (but in reverse video)

You have to go thru major contortions to do most of this fancy
prompting with ksh.

My tcsh prompt also sometimes has: root's "#", "screen" (a terminal
emulator by Oliver Laumann) window number, and shell level depth.

Actually I'm waiting for GNU's "Bourne again shell" (what will it
have?).

My interactive commands, most not being multiline, would be the same
in all the shells mentioned, mostly.  True, the csh family's (csh,
tcsh) "repeat", "@" etc. commands are useful.  BSD users see their sh
scripts with "test" calls run slower than their csh scripts with
built-in (e.g. "if (-e file) command") calls because "test" is not
built-in in BSD's sh and instead lives in /bin/test (linked to "/bin/[" !).

I have been burned by csh's limitations on piping into loops,
manipulating standard output and error, etc, and generally think sh is
more robust.  In sh you get to play with many file descriptors and
traps, etc.

Portability is very important to me.  I don't think I'm forcing myself
to use a less flexible shell for portability's sake.  I would still
use sh, portable or not.

If I were to write a csh script, I wouldn't use tcsh instead.  I don't
usually need the interactive advantages of tcsh in a script, and csh
would be more portable.

Well, that's the last of my effort for shell wars... please debate
this amongst yourselves.  Now on to other wars, e.g. "notes" (boo) vs.
"rn" (yea!)  vs. ....

Dan Jacobson
-- 
jacobson at eecs.nwu.edu   or   {oddjob,gargoyle,att,...}!nucsrl!jacobson