tcsh

TENEX C Shell

File:Tcsh screenshot.png Screenshot of a sample tcsh session
Developer(s)	Ken Greer, Paul Placeway, Christos Zoulas, et al.
Stable release	6.17.00 / July 10, 2009
Written in	C
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Unix shell
License	BSD License
Website	http://www.tcsh.org/

tcsh (pronounced /tiːˈsiːʃɛl/, /ˈtiːʃɛl/, or as an acronym, /ˌtiː ˌsiː ˌɛs ˈeɪtʃ/) is a Unix shell based on and compatible with the C shell (csh). It is essentially the C shell with programmable command line completion, command-line editing, and a few other features.

History

The 't' in tcsh comes from the T in TENEX, an operating system which inspired Ken Greer, the author of tcsh, with its command-completion feature. Ken Greer worked on tcsh in the late 1970s at Carnegie Mellon University. Paul Placeway from The Ohio State University continued work on it in the 1980s, and since then it has been maintained by numerous people. Wilfredo Sanchez, the former lead engineer of Mac OS X, worked on tcsh in the early 1990s at MIT.

Deployment

Early versions of Mac OS X shipped with tcsh as the default shell, but the default for new accounts is bash as of 10.3. (tcsh is still provided, and upgrading the OS does not change the shell of any existing accounts.) Iowa State's implementation of MIT's Project Athena (Project Vincent) by default uses tcsh as the default shell, although users can change this.

The tcsh is the default shell of FreeBSD and its descendants like DragonFly BSD, PC-BSD and DesktopBSD.

External links

• tcsh Home Page
• tcsh manual page
• Archive for the O'Reilly book "Using csh and tcsh"