Question about type of shell I'm using

[jwermont]

Hi,

I typed "echo $0" at the prompt in my shell terminal, and it responded "-csh". Isn't csh a really old shell? I can remember being encouraged to use something different decades ago. Was this a decision by the admins at Sonic, to default to -csh? This isn't a complaint, btw, but I'm wondering if I might have done something inadvertently to select csh instead of something else. If this is the default shell chosen by Sonic, that's fine. Thanks!

Edit: I just checked to see whether csh was linked to anything else, and it is, to tcsh. Sorry, never mind!

[lr]

If you don't like tcsh, you can switch to bash, by using the "chsh" command. Note that /bin/sh is really bash, and (as you discovered) /bin/csh is really tcsh. There might be even more shells installed, but I think 99% of the population uses either tcsh or bash.

[scott]

Hi,

I typed "echo $0" at the prompt in my shell terminal, and it responded "-csh". Isn't csh a really old shell? I can remember being encouraged to use something different decades ago. Was this a decision by the admins at Sonic, to default to -csh? This isn't a complaint, btw, but I'm wondering if I might have done something inadvertently to select csh instead of something else. If this is the default shell chosen by Sonic, that's fine. Thanks!

Edit: I just checked to see whether csh was linked to anything else, and it is, to tcsh. Sorry, never mind!

Hi folks,

The default shell is /bin/sh, which is bash. In July of 1998, you asked it to be changed to csh. 20 years ago!

You have indeed been a loyal customer, thank you for staying with us all these years.

[jwermont]

I've been pretty happy with Sonic for the past 20 years, and have convinced a few people to get accounts. I do wish the shell services were supported (via tech support), but otherwise I've had very few problems.

I'm noticing a few changes in how international characters are represented in different programs, since the upgrade. In mutt, accented characters are represented as "\<number>", but in vi, I can see the actual character. A couple of examples:

"é" in vi is displayed as "\351" in mutt.
"á" is displayed as "\341"

I'm not familiar with the "\<number>" format, and in fact, if I do a search in mutt for the backslash, it doesn't find it. (I do know to backslash the backslash. ) So that character isn't actually in the file, nor is the number code, but for some reason, that is how it's displayed on the screen. I also searched for the accented character, but that also wasn't found.

I read on a forum (forget which one) that vi just uses whatever the shell uses for character decoding/display. But the information on the unix/linux forums is sometimes wildly outdated. I was reading posts from 2001 (!). There are a lot of ways to encode characters, and I don't know all of them. I'm trying to set everything to use UTF-8, so characters will appear consistently, but I haven't figured out how to do that in mutt. Any suggestions for how to do this, and/or where to find an overview of different encoding types and how to change them in configuration files for shell programs?

Thanks,
J. Wermont

[joemuller]

I'm noticing a few changes in how international characters are represented in different programs, since the upgrade. In mutt, accented characters are represented as "\<number>", but in vi, I can see the actual character. A couple of examples:

"é" in vi is displayed as "\351" in mutt.
"á" is displayed as "\341"

I'm not familiar with the "\<number>" format, and in fact, if I do a search in mutt for the backslash, it doesn't find it. (I do know to backslash the backslash. ) So that character isn't actually in the file, nor is the number code, but for some reason, that is how it's displayed on the screen. I also searched for the accented character, but that also wasn't found.

I think I may have found a solution for you - check out the 'Charset' section of the MuttFAQ.

-- Joe