boot banner project

[Brian Candler]

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 12:38:18PM +0100, Bruce M Simpson wrote:
> On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 10:40:00AM +0100, Brian Candler wrote:
> > Now the only essential package to install is a POSIX shell with interactive
> > command history - i.e. "bash" - and it looks like /bin/sh has now gained
> > that capability too, although sadly not tab-completion.
> 
> tcsh is in the base system and has that capability.

Except:

(1) it's not enabled by default (you need "set autolist", which I only
    discovered recently)

(2) it's not a POSIX shell.

For me, (2) is serious. I don't want to use a different syntax for
redirecting I/O, setting environment variables and looping over arguments,
just to get tab-completion.

I have done quite a lot of teaching of FreeBSD to newbies (both Unix newbies
and ex-Linux users). It's a source of frustration that root's shell is
different to a normal user's shell, and also that root's shell is not POSIX.
Most Linux distributions solve this simply by using bash for both.

Now that /bin/sh has command history, I'd definitely vote for that to be
made the default shell for root in FreeBSD-6, and then csh can be left to
die in peace as it should have done years ago :-)

Regards,

Brian.