Switching from tcsh to bash?

momerath2003 asks: "With the advent of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, Apple will switch its default shell from tcsh to bash (in order to conform more to the newer Linux trends). A lot of Mac power users will want to know how to make the switch, especially if they use such tcsh-specific extra files as the login/out scripts in the /usr/share/tcsh/examples directory (they automatically set up some aliases and can automatically read aliases from a specific file, among other things). So, how do we all adapt? What are some ways to emulate the behavior of the example files, and what differences are there between the bash and tcsh shells?"

Comments

My bash sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you bash fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a bash (a 2.05b w/64 Megs of RAM allocated) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to execute a 17 Kb script in one folder on the hard drive from another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running tcsh, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this bash, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, lynx will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even vi is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various bashes, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a bash that has run faster than its tcsh counterpart, despite the bashes' faster parsing routines. My ksh88 with 8 megs of ram allocated runs faster than this 2.05b bash at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the bash is a superior shell.

bash addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a bash over other faster, cheaper, more stable shells.