bash vs tcsh/csh

[ramack]

I know very little about bash scripting. Most of the bash scripts I've written are pretty basic, just doing minor stuff at home and at work. At work, tcsh & csh is used. I've asked why we use tcsh instead of bash and responses have been very uninformative, "that's what we have always used, it does what we need it to do, etc..."

So what's the "big" advantage, if any, of tcsh vs bash? Is it more of a preference? From what I've found online, bash has taken the "good" things from the other shells and put them into one.

I did find some info that gave very short for loop example and tcsh was more compact and shorter by 2-3 lines.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

https://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/misc/csh.html

POSIX sh ftw!

[ramack]

Yup, saw that one. Gloom & doom, the sky is falling...

[neuraleskimo]

I know very little about bash scripting. Most of the bash scripts I've written are pretty basic, just doing minor stuff at home and at work. At work, tcsh & csh is used. I've asked why we use tcsh instead of bash and responses have been very uninformative, "that's what we have always used, it does what we need it to do, etc..."

So what's the "big" advantage, if any, of tcsh vs bash? Is it more of a preference? From what I've found online, bash has taken the "good" things from the other shells and put them into one.

I did find some info that gave very short for loop example and tcsh was more compact and shorter by 2-3 lines.

If your employer has been around for a few decades, my hunch is that your company had an investment in some flavor(s) of BSD and/or some well-respected/influential people had a BSD background. When the choice was made to use tcsh, I suspect the decision made sense given the constraints and requirements at the time. Eventually, all of that history was ...well, lost to history. I doubt you will get a satisfactory technical argument now. However, keep working your social network, you might eventually find some of the original decision makers. It might lead to an interesting story.

FWIW, I have a soft spot for BSD and csh/tcsh. My first accounts as an undergraduate student (1990) were on BSD systems. Through much of the 1990's, I dual booted FreeBSD and Linux, but FreeBSD was my daily driver until the late 1990's. I still have fond memories of those days. I can understand why some of that legacy might have survived.