Migrating from tcsh to bash
My move to Linux in the workplace almost necessarily entails a shell change. I’ve been using tcsh for years, going back to the days before bash added tab completion, if memory serves, but in the last year or so, I’ve been considering a switch to bash for several reasons:
- It’s the default shell on the Mac and most CLI help articles reference bash.
- Every Unix variant I can think of seems to ship with bash as the default shell.
- Some Unix variants don’t even bother to ship with tcsh.
Ubuntu, my distro of choice, is one of those variants that doesn’t ship with tcsh. Yeah, I know I can install tcsh easily enough, but that seems like a recipe for repetition over time as I work on new machines running other distros that may or may not include a tcsh install. For the sake of universal access, I think I’d rather just conform.
This past weekend I began the process of migrating my well-worn, painstakingly accumulated .tcshrc login script to its bash counterpart, .bash_profile. What I’m finding is that it’s not all that simple.
shell, bash, tcsh, linux 0 Comments