1 Topic by schilling.klaus

  • schilling.klaus
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  • Registered: 2022-11-27
  • Posts: 55

Topic: C shell

The C shell has lost a lot of its former significance, but it appears still somewhat popular in the world of traditional BSD system administration.

OpenBSD comes with some C shell in its base, but I am not sure how portable it is.

Tenex C Shell (tcsh) is more portable and only requires rather ubiquitous dependencies. The license is problematic as it contains the obnoxious non-advertisement clause. (3-clause BSD)

2 Reply by anthk

  • anthk
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  • Registered: 2022-04-27
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Re: C shell

Well, OpenBSD has mksh, and tcsh has always being bashed down (no pun intended) by the rest of the shell users.

If you target ksh most of it will be portable among shells.

3 Reply by blackhole

  • blackhole
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Re: C shell

csh and tcsh have some differences to Bourne type (Almquist, Korn, etc) shells, in that it was originally engineered to be familiar to c programmers.  You tend to like/use whatever you're used to and it's all down to preference.

OpenBSD's csh is not tcsh, looks like a fork of the original BSD c shell and is also BSD 3-clause licenced.

3-clause BSD is still probably one of the most widespread permissive licenses out there.  The old 4-clause licence was by far the more problematic one, but obviously 2-clause or ISC are preferable.