The csh madness
I have been aware of it for a long time. But, from time to time, you need to make up your mind about it: the csh unix shell simply sucks. I noticed this again today when I tried to execute a simple ‘while’-loop on the shell within one line, something like ‘% while ( true ) ; doSomething ; end’. This is simply not possible with [t]csh: it needs a line feed after the while statement. More reasons why not to use [t]csh can be found at csh programming considered harmful and Top Ten Reasons not to use the C shell. The most obvious for me is: it does not support functions or procedures. So, just do not use it. Use a shell like sh, bash, ksh, zsh. For more complex scripts, use a modern scripting language like Python or Ruby.