Cshell is punk rock

Bill Joy’s 1978 contribution to UNIX shells is an immature, brash little son-of-a-bitch, and I love it for all that it is.

Cshell is synonymous with ‘don’t use Cshell.’ Every time I look up a ‘howto’ or workaround about it, inevitably, there’s at least one diatribe knocking it down. Cshell is punk rock in this regard; few believe in its merits.

Low fidelity

I like Cshell quite bit. It’s from the heyday of BSD , and there’s a certain bombastic nature in the tools that came from this movement. Cshell has this residue for certain.

‘Never script with Cshell,’ they say. Well, there’s SNAFU s galore in this tool, and I’m not going pretend to deny it. Why, just this week, something wasn’t working, and the work-around was clearly mystical in nature.

However, there’s a ton that’s great with this bratty shell:

1. It’s lean
2. It’s embraced by the OpenBSD folks
3. It has arrays (hell ya)
4. Scripts can start with the ‘#’ character only
5. ‘cshrc’ configuration files read somewhat beautifully

It’s a small list, yes, but my point is there’s some unique goodness to Cshell (not least of which is the first point — I think there’s a chance that a person can actually master this shell, committing all its features to memory. I don’t think I could do that with ‘bash’).

Tight pants

Cshell is probably in the alt-tech category for most modern developers. I don’t think it stands a chance next to the likes of the endlessly featured and popular ‘zsh’ and ‘bash.’

But that’s my point about Cshell. It’s a little punk rocker from yesteryear. One that gets a ton of flak, though I wouldn’t be surprised if eighty per cent of this is just hackers repeating what they’ve heard second-hand.

If you’re into alt-tech, would like to ponder over tools created in a stoked time of programming, or just want to see how ‘bad’ Cshell is, give it a spin sometime. But be careful, you might be one of those people who falls under its spell never to use anything else again! (You’ve been warned.)