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