(revised for 4.3BSD by Mark Seiden)
Computer Science Division
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California 94720
Csh is a new command language interpreter for UNIXsystems. It incorporates good features of other shells and a history mechanism similar to the redo of INTERLISP. While incorporating many features of other shells which make writing shell programs (shell scripts) easier, most of the features unique to csh are designed more for the interactive UNIX user.
UNIX users who have read a general introduction to the system will find a valuable basic explanation of the shell here. Simple terminal interaction with csh is possible after reading just the first section of this document. The second section describes the shell's capabilities which you can explore after you have begun to become acquainted with the shell. Later sections introduce features which are useful, but not necessary for all users of the shell.
Additional information includes an appendix listing special characters of the shell and a glossary of terms and commands introduced in this manual.
A shell is a command language interpreter. Csh is the name of one particular command interpreter on UNIX. The primary purpose of csh is to translate command lines typed at a terminal into system actions, such as invocation of other programs. Csh is a user program just like any you might write. Hopefully, csh will be a very useful program for you in interacting with the UNIX system.
In addition to this document, you will want to refer to a copy of the UNIX User Reference Manual. The csh documentation in section 1 of the manual provides a full description of all features of the shell and is the definitive reference for questions about the shell.
Many words in this document are shown in italics. These are important words; names of commands, and words which have special meaning in discussing the shell and UNIX. Many of the words are defined in a glossary at the end of this document. If you don't know what is meant by a word, you should look for it in the glossary.
Numerous people have provided good input about previous versions
and aided in its debugging and in the debugging of its documentation.
I would especially like to thank Michael Ubell
who made the crucial observation that history commands could be
done well over the word structure of input text, and implemented
a prototype history mechanism in an older version of the shell.
Eric Allman has also provided a large number of useful comments on the
shell, helping to unify those concepts which are present and to identify
and eliminate useless and marginally useful features.
Mike O'Brien suggested the pathname hashing
mechanism which speeds command execution.
Jim Kulp added the job control and directory stack primitives and
added their documentation to this introduction.