[nycbug-talk] using tcsh

[Marc Spitzer]

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004 17:13:21 -0400
George Georgalis <george at galis.org> wrote:

> /*  Regards to the friends and family of Chuck Yerkes, RIP.  */
> 
> I've been over the tcsh man and other sources numerous times but have
> been unable to save and restore tcsh command line history through exit
> and next login.
> 
> 'set savehist' in ~/.tcshrc is all I'd expect be required, but I've
> been doing various things with 'histfile' too; the functionality I'm
> looking for is 'savehist 1000 merge' -- how do I know when to use
> 'set' vs 'setenv'?
> 

Being that I have a severe dislike of csh and its derivatives this may
not be 100% accurate, but:

set == when you want it available in this shell and only in this shell

setenv == when you want it available in this shell and any child
processes of this shell

see here for reasons why csh is bad: http://frmb.org/csh_whynot.html

tcsh is better then csh but that is just not saying much.

If you want to learn a portable shell look at korn or posix sh.

marc