liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk (William Roberts;) (03/22/91)
Read my Lips - Get /bin/tcsh
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I'd like to take a few minutes of your time to introduce you to a product that
could change your life, forever. Are you sick of /bin/sh, cheesed off with
/bin/csh, totally something-derogatory-beginning-with-K with /bin/ksh?
6 months ago, I was in exactly the same position. Now I have two houses, a
small car, an A/UX tee-shirt and all because of /bin/tcsh. This product is
not available in any shop, and I don't accept any major credit cards.
So what are the 3 Reasons Why tcsh is The Answer For You?
* line editing with cursor keys
the left and right cursor keys will allow you to edit the command
that you are typing: delete deletes the character next to the cursor,
new characters get inserted into the line as you type.
the up and down cursor keys move you around in your command history
so you can easily go back to a previous line, edit it a bit and
then press return to execute the new command line!
* filename completion
Fed up of typing those ludicrously long Modula-2 file names?
Now you can use automatic filename completion: press the tab key at
the end of a partial pathname and tcsh will try to complete it for you.
For example, try typing the following and see what happens - I'm using
(TAB) to means "press the tab key" and (RET) to mean "press return":
cd /contrib/public/2nd/softeng/bags(RET)
ls B(TAB)
o(TAB)
A(TAB)
(RET)
Neat and saves all that typing! Even better, it already understands
the problems of filenames containing spaces, and it puts in "\ " for you.
This is a shell that no A/UX user will want to be without!
* spell checking
How often you do type a command, only to get an error message
like "TextEditro: command not found"? Tcsh line & history editing
will help you here of course, but this amazing product goes one better
% TextEditro myfile
Do you mean TextEditor myfile (y/n)?
At last, a computer that occasionally has the common sense to know
that we humans don't always mean what we say.
* user configurable options of all sorts
You can specify a command that gets executed every time you change
directory (alias cwdcmd rm * perhaps - tcsh also removes unwanted
files and pet hair from sofas, curtains etc).
You can specify a command to execute before printing the prompt
(alias precmd '(cd /usr/src/GNU/gcc; make clean world install' will
certainly help put a stop to those out-of-date compiler miseries
automatic logouts on idle - this isn't useful for window systems so
we aren't using it a QMW, but I can type set autologout=0 to enab
Apple Computer, Inc. A/UX
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