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I would be interested to know the reasoning behind using different shells for interactive sessions vs. scripting on FreeBSD. Wouldn't it be easier to pick one f

by hetman 12y ago

I would be interested to know the reasoning behind using different shells for interactive sessions vs. scripting on FreeBSD. Wouldn't it be easier to pick one for both? Is this just historical legacy?

sophacles 12y ago
Many linux distros do this too... e.g. debian based systems default to bash or zsh for interactive shells, and use dash for /bin/sh (aka scripting).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- aruggirello 12y ago
  Ubuntu does it too. That's the reason debian and Ubuntu weren't hit too hard by the Bash bug.
- hetman 12y ago
  True but dash and bash are mostly interchangeable. I should have clarified that what was strange to me was the choice of shells with incompatible syntax.
smhenderson 12y ago
I'm not sure why FreeBSD defaults to csh for interactive use other than it's probably just developer preference on their part. But for scripting, this old gem kept coming up for me when reading about FreeBSD: http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/versus/csh.whynot http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/versus/csh.whynot It's basically a bunch of reasons why c shell scripting is not recommended...
talideon 12y ago
You can blame Bill Joy for that. Allegedly, it was him who made csh the default root shell way back in the day. The reason it was never changed to sh or ksh subsequently is simply that it was never that big a deal: tcsh is a solid interactive shell, it sucks for scripting.