Chapter 9. The TC Shell

9. The TC Shell

IN THIS CHAPTER

Shell Scripts	338
Entering and Leaving the TC Shell	338
Features Common to the Bourne Again and TC Shells	341
Redirecting Standard Error	346
Word Completion	348
Editing the Command Line	350
Variables	352
Reading User Input	358
Control Structures	364
Builtins	373

The TC Shell (tcsh) performs the same function as the Bourne Again Shell and other shells: It provides an interface between you and the Mac OS X operating system. The TC Shell is an interactive command interpreter as well as a high-level programming language. Although you use only one shell at any given time, you should be able to switch back and forth comfortably between shells as the need arises (you may want to run different shells in different windows). Chapters 8 and 13 apply to tcsh as well as to bash so they provide a good background for this chapter. This chapter explains tcsh features that are not found in bash and those that are implemented differently from their bash counterparts. The tcsh home page is www.tcsh.org.

The TC Shell is an expanded version of the C Shell (csh), which originated on Berkeley UNIX. The "T" in TC Shell comes from the TENEX and TOPS-20 operating systems, which inspired command completion and other features in the TC Shell. A number of features not found in csh are present in tcsh, including file and username completion, command line editing, and spelling correction. As with csh, you can customize tcsh to make it more tolerant of mistakes and easier to use. By setting the proper shell variables, you can have tcsh warn you when you appear to be accidentally logging out or overwriting a file. Many popular features of the original C Shell are now shared by bash and tcsh.

Assignment statement

Although some of the functionality of tcsh is present in bash, differences arise in the syntax of some commands. For example, the tcsh assignment statement has the following syntax:

set variable = value 

Having SPACEs on either side of the equal sign, although illegal in bash, is allowed in tcsh. By convention shell variables in tcsh are generally named with lowercase letters, not uppercase (you can use either). If you reference an undeclared variable (one that has had no value assigned to it), tcsh will give you an error message, whereas bash will not. Finally the default tcsh prompt is a greater than sign (>), but it is frequently set to a single $ character followed by a SPACE. The examples in this chapter use a prompt of tcsh $ to avoid confusion with the bash prompt.

Tip: Do not use tcsh as a programming language

If you have used UNIX and are comfortable with the C or TC Shell, you may want to use tcsh as your login shell. However, you may find that the TC Shell is not as good a programming language as bash. If you are going to learn only one shell programming language, learn bash. The Bourne Again Shell is used throughout Mac OS X to program many system administration scripts.