Inside Solaris™ 9

Selecting a Shell to Use

The login shell is the command interpreter that runs when you log in. The Solaris 9 operating environment offers three commonly used shells:

• The Bourne shell (/sbin/sh) This is the default shell. It is a command interpreter that executes commands read from a terminal or a file.

• The C shell (/bin/csh) This is a command interpreter with a C-like syntax. The C shell provides a number of convenient features for interactive use that are not available with the Bourne shell, including filename completion, command aliasing, and history substitution.

• The Korn shell (/bin/ksh) This is a command interpreter that executes commands read from a terminal or a file.

When writing scripts, you can use any of these three shells. ...