from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
C shell
csh
<operating system> (csh) The {Unix} {command-line interpreter}
{shell} and {script language} by {William Joy}, originating
from {Berkeley} {Unix}.
{Unix} systems up to around {Unix Version 7} only had one
shell - the {Bourne shell}, sh. Csh had better {interactive}
features, notably command input {history}, allowing earlier
commands to be recalled and edited (though it was still not as
good as the {VMS} equivalent of the time).
Presumably, csh's {C}-like {syntax} was intended to endear it
to programmers but sadly it lacks some {sh} features which are
useful for writing {shell scripts} so you need to know two
different syntaxes for every shell construct.
A plethora of different shells followed csh, e.g. {tcsh},
{ksh}, {bash}, {rc}, but sh and csh are the only ones which
are provided with most versions of Unix.
(1998-04-04)