13.1. Introduction

An interactive shell is one in which the standard input, output, and errors are connected to a terminal. When using the TC[1] shell (tcsh) interactively, you will type commands at the tcsh prompt and wait for a response. The TC shell is a program that starts up at login and interprets commands. It is a public domain enhanced version of its predecessor, the Berkeley UNIX C shell. Added features include command line editing, fancy prompts, programmable completions (filenames, commands, and variables), spelling correction, etc.

[1] The T in tcsh has origins dating back to the TENEX and TOP-10s operating systems used by DEC for its PDP-10 computer. These systems had a form of command completion for the monitor. The creator of the ...

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