csh is root's shell?

Philip Paeps philip at freebsd.org
Tue Oct 5 23:54:39 PDT 2004


On 2004-10-05 21:00:51 (-0400), Geoff Speicher <geoff at speicher.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 05:26:32PM -0700, Jason C. Wells wrote:
> > --On Tuesday, October 05, 2004 5:19 PM -0700 David Wolfskill 
> > <david at catwhisker.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > Well, per
> > > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/etc/master.passwd?rev=1.1&conte
> > > nt-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup it looks as if /bin/csh was root's shell as
> > > of Revision 1.1, Sun Jun 20 13:41:37 1993 UTC (11 years, 3 months ago) by
> > > rgrimes.
> > >
> > > No, I didn't check to see if it had changed back & forth in the interim.
> > 
> > Wow.  I must have been carrying my passwd files along with my upgrades
> > since forever.  I don't have a single system that has csh as root's shell.
> 
> I imagine it was made the default because of its supposed friendly
> interactivity features.

FreeBSD's csh is really tcsh, which is quite friendly for interactive use.  I
seem to recall that many shells have in fact borrowed some of the friendly
features of tcsh (think zsh).

> I personally find it quite the contrary (no offense to Bill Joy of course),
> as do plenty of others.

A matter of taste.

> Google on 'csh considered harmful' for a compelling argument.

That's about shell programming, not about interactive use.

  <http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/>

 - Philip [yes, happy tcsh user :-)]

-- 
Philip Paeps                                    Please don't Cc me, I am
philip at freebsd.org                               subscribed to the list.

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