Adding Shells to the System and Making Them Available

Most users will probably be satisfied with the default FreeBSD shell, /bin/tcsh (the same as /bin/csh). It provides command-line editing, tab completion, history navigation, and the rest of the advanced shell features missing in the more rudimentary shells. However, the fact that FreeBSD defaults to tcsh rather than bash (which is commonly used in Linux) reflects the subtle philosophical differences between the BSD tradition and the System V structure (which accounts for much of the architecture of Linux), an argument as old as UNIX itself. These philosophical differences used to mean a lot more than they do today. Commercial flavors of UNIX generally fall into one camp or the other and haven’t ...

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