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Grex Info Item 111: Best shell for beginner?
Entered by cicero on Wed Feb 16 19:21:32 UTC 1994:

I'm getting more interested in UNIX of late and I thought I might start
playing around with a shell a bit.  (So far i've made very limited use of
anything outside of Picospan).  I was just wondering what people thought
was the best shell for someone like me to start learning, and why?  What
is the best shell overall, and why?

4 responses total.

#1 of 4 by gregc on Wed Feb 16 20:22:32 1994:

The best shell for beginners: it depends.
The best shell overall: Are you trying to start another religous war??? :-)

#2 of 4 by davel on Thu Feb 17 01:16:50 1994:

csh is more powerful than sh but has a higher & steeper initial learning
curve, & more things to worry about.  (I gather that you *don't* want to
make it your login shell until you've got a .login and a .cshrc set up,
for example.  So if you choose csh, play with it until you're comfortable
on top of the bbs or something, then look around at a few people's
configurations to see what kind of thing you need - *before* running
chsh.)

#3 of 4 by remmers on Thu Feb 17 02:17:04 1994:

Beginners aren't apt to get into much in which the choice of shell
makes that much difference.  Personally, I'd recommend "tcsh" because
it's compatible with "csh" but has some nice additional features,
such as the ability to recall previous commands using the up-arrow
key.

#4 of 4 by cicero on Thu Feb 17 06:15:21 1994:

re 3: Ooooh, that one sounds nice--good for figuring what what wrong with your
last command that made it not work!  :D

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