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eppur_se_muova

(40,573 posts)
Mon Nov 17, 2025, 02:47 AM Monday

Anyone know why the old csh is now codice non grata ? And what's so freakin' hot about zsh ?

OSX and Manjaro have both defaulted to zsh and I can't invoke csh anymore in Manjaro -- it doesn't even seem to allow a d/l of csh. (OSX lets me use chsh )

(I know, csh on OSX is really tcsh, a superset of csh).

I'm used to running long, resource-greedy jobs in bg -- just add "&" after the command and then logout of Terminal. In zsh, this kills the job whether you want it to or not.Just trying to bg a process in zsh requires a couple of pages of reading. Who asked for that ?

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Anyone know why the old csh is now codice non grata ? And what's so freakin' hot about zsh ? (Original Post) eppur_se_muova Monday OP
The company with a small army of lawyers did this: usonian Monday #1
csh is old Tasmanian Devil Wednesday #2
Thanks for the link. I'm the curmudgeonly type who resents people fixing things that aren't broken. eppur_se_muova Thursday #3
Welcome to DU LetMyPeopleVote Thursday #4

usonian

(22,660 posts)
1. The company with a small army of lawyers did this:
Mon Nov 17, 2025, 05:14 AM
Monday

Apple switched to zsh to avoid the licensing obligations of GPLv3 required by current versions of bash.

And that is all.

chsh -s /bin/bash

However: Apple still distributes a version (of bash) licensed under GPLv2. You can update it.

No lawyer makes programming decisions for me.

Proof of pudding: Show me a script that begins with
#! /bin/zsh

🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗

Real programmers write scripts in perl. IMNSHO
It does so much more and is 1337.



2. csh is old
Wed Nov 19, 2025, 10:07 PM
Wednesday

Csh is from BSD (older than Linux) and is buggier than bash, especially when writing scripts. For more info check out the end of the wiki page on it: csh reception

But I think the bottom line was just that fewer and fewer people are sitting at shell prompts and scripting (and sh) won the shell wars.

That said, I always set my interactive shell to csh and run background stuff with:

nohup program_name < /dev/null >& output.log &

I.e. just add nohup and deal with stdin, stdout, stderr. Not that much to teach your fingers.

If csh/tcsh is not included in Manjaro, I'm pretty sure you could download the source and build it: see https://github.com/tcsh-org/tcsh

eppur_se_muova

(40,573 posts)
3. Thanks for the link. I'm the curmudgeonly type who resents people fixing things that aren't broken.
Thu Nov 20, 2025, 05:33 AM
Thursday

Anything which adds something to teach your fingers should be multiplied by the millions, or possibly billions, of people who will have to do "just a little bit more" thousands of times every year to appreciate its real impact.

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