Apparently, csh programming is considered harmful.

Chuck Robey chuckr at chuckr.org
Fri Dec 14 11:25:36 PST 2007


Jerry McAllister wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 08:12:32PM -0500, Mike Jeays wrote:
> 
>> On December 13, 2007 08:05:42 pm Chad Perrin wrote:
>>> I ran across this today:
>>>
>>>   http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/
>>>
>>> Title:
>>>   Csh Programming Considered Harmful
>>>
>>> I wonder what responses I might get here, and how much of this applies to
>>> tcsh as well (I'm still not exactly a tcsh expert).
>> As you can see, it is 11 years old, but still good advice.  For interactive 
>> use, tcsh is not too bad, but for writing scripts of any length, sh or bash 
>> are considered better tools.   For code that will run anywhere, stick to the 
>> sh subset. 
>>
>> <flamebait>Bash has all the features one is likely to need for interactive use 
>> as well, and one could make a good case for it being the 'standard' shell 
>> now.</flamebait>
> 
> Here it is.
> I find bash to be ugly and hate it for interactive use.
> I would rather just use /bin/sh.

As long as folks don't stop me from running whatever I want, I don't 
care if you use bash, but it really irks me, that most Linux systems are 
broken in that respect: Most of them break badly in random ways, if you 
don't run bash as your shell.  That's poor programming practice, but the 
Linux programmers, since they all run bash themselves, they don't see 
the results of their errors, and they all claim its not a problem.  Try 
running tcsh there, you'll see what I mean reasonably soon, when you 
begin to get random weirdnesses...


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list