<
operating system> (csh) The
Unix command-line interpreter
shell and
script language by
William Joy, originating
from
Berkeley Unix.
Unix systems up to around
Unix Version 7 only had one
shell - the
Bourne shell, sh. Csh had better
interactive
features, notably command input
history, allowing earlier
commands to be recalled and edited (though it was still not as
good as the
VMS equivalent of the time).
Presumably, csh's
C-like
syntax was intended to endear it
to programmers but sadly it lacks some
sh features which are
useful for writing
shell scripts so you need to know two
different syntaxes for every shell construct.
A plethora of different shells followed csh, e.g.
tcsh,
ksh,
bash,
rc, but sh and csh are the only ones which
are provided with most versions of Unix.
(1998-04-04)