This handbook is divided into three parts. Part I, Learning the Basics, is designed to get you off the ground by providing a basic introduction to the shell and a broad survey that shows how to use the shell's more advanced features to accomplish many different kinds of tasks.
Part II, Becoming More Efficient, provides a more topical approach to the shell's capabilities. The chapters in Part II focus on particular aspects of the shell. You'll find these chapters useful when you want more information about features of the shell that are demonstrated in Part I.
Part III contains the appendixes, which provide information about obtaining and installing tcsh, a quick reference to those shell capabilities discussed in this handbook, and pointers to other documentation relating to csh and tcsh.
Chapter 1, Introduction, discusses the purpose of the shell and describes how to change your login shell to one of those discussed in this handbook.
Chapter 2, A Shell Primer, provides a summary of introductory essentials. If you already know something about running commands, you can skim this chapter as a review or skip it.
Chapter 3, Using the Shell Effectively, is an overview of many of the facilities that the shell provides to help you work more efficientlyâeasy, practical ways to get more out of the command line. Often, even experienced users are not aware of all of these features. This chapter gives you a glimpse of the kinds of techniques that are covered in detail in the rest of the book.
Chapter 4, The Shell Startup Files, describes Ë/.cshrc and Ë/.login, the files that the shell uses to initialize your working environment. This chapter also provides guidelines for modifying the startup files to suit your preferences.
Chapter 5, Setting Up Your Terminal, discusses how to find out what your terminal's special characters are (e.g., for backspacing) and how to change them if you don't like the default settings.
Chapter 6, Using Your Command History, discusses how to type less by using your command history.
Chapter 7, The tcsh Command-Line Editor, describes the facilities offered by the editor which enable you to edit commands interactively.
Chapter 8, Using Aliases To Create Command Shortcuts, discusses how to type less by using the shell's alias mechanism to create command shortcuts.
Chapter 9, File-Naming Shortcuts, describes ways in which the shell can supply filename arguments for you so that you don't have to type them all out yourself.
Chapter 10, Filename and Programmed Completion, describes how to use the shell for completing filenames after you type just the leading prefix. It also discusses how tcsh can complete other types of words besides filenames and how to set up programmed completions.
Chapter 11, Quoting and Special Characters, describes the shell's quoting rules. By following these rules, you can type any characters in a command line, even special ones, without having them misinterpreted.
Chapter 12, Using Commands To Generate Arguments, discusses command substitution, a facility that lets you construct pieces of a command line from the output of other commands.
Chapter 13, Navigating the File System, describes how to move around in the file system efficiently.
Chapter 14, Keeping Track of Where You Are, describes how to stay informed about your current location in the file system.
Chapter 15, Job Control, shows how to suspend, resume, and kill jobs; switch between jobs; and move jobs between the foreground and background.
Appendix A, Obtaining and Installing tcsh, describes how to make tcsh available on your system if you don't have the current version.
Appendix B, csh and tcsh Quick Reference, is a summary of those features and capabilities of csh and tcsh described in this handbook.
Appendix C, Other Sources of Information, contains pointers to other documentation. The most important of these references is the tcsh manual page. It's available in several forms, one of which can be navigated via hypertext links with a World Wide Web browser.
Get Using csh & tcsh now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
