C shell

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)