On Tue, 14 Feb 2006, Nate Straz wrote: > If you want a shell war, you'll need to throw tcsh in there too. ;) OS X dropped tcsh as the default shell in favor of bash. The history is that tcsh was a Berkeley product and bash is a GNU product, so tcsh went with FreeBSD, and from there to OS X. I was a Solaris user and was stuck for years with csh, which is abysmal (tcsh does absolutely everything that csh does, but a *lot* more and it is fully csh-compatible). Tcsh is actually a very nice shell and has nearly all of the features you'll find in bash, even a few that bash is lacking, but I have to admit that it is best for me to switch to bash for several reasons. The main reason is that bash has become the standard shell to use in Linux and OS X, so I should train students on bash unless I have a good reason to teach them tcsh. The only reason I have to teach tcsh is that I know it. I need to learn bash now. In addition to the above issues, there is this: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/ Criticisms of csh as a scripting language apply equally to tcsh. Most of you have seen that article already. It's really good. I think it is worth studying if you want to gain a deeper understanding of shell scripting. Mike