why Centos uses tcsh as default shell ?

A 5 star hangout for overworked and underpaid system admins.
Post Reply
sanfx
Posts: 3
Joined: 2015/02/15 14:37:08

why Centos uses tcsh as default shell ?

Post by sanfx » 2015/02/15 14:46:55

I recently came across Fish shell the best thing I liked about it is the auto completion and how light grey text appears while auto completion is still suggesting..

I think this is a great feature however I do not know on overall how performance and security wise fish shell works . Can anyone please enlighten me the reason to use tcsh rather than fish shell.

Or Fish shell is just a fancy little shell ?

User avatar
TrevorH
Site Admin
Posts: 33202
Joined: 2009/09/24 10:40:56
Location: Brighton, UK

Re: why Centos uses tcsh as default shell ?

Post by TrevorH » 2015/02/15 17:31:51

Last time I looked the default shell was bash. You can yum remove tcsh but you can't do that for bash
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

sanfx
Posts: 3
Joined: 2015/02/15 14:37:08

Re: why Centos uses tcsh as default shell ?

Post by sanfx » 2015/02/16 06:36:18

well either way why it uses bash then, how come it is better than fish shell in same regards ?

scottro
Forum Moderator
Posts: 2556
Joined: 2007/09/03 21:18:09
Location: NYC
Contact:

Re: why Centos uses tcsh as default shell ?

Post by scottro » 2015/02/16 14:22:01

Not having used fish, I don't know. However, bash has been the default shell in most Linux distributions for many years. (It's also the default in Mac OSX).

In FreeBSD, the default shell is tcsh and one is advised against changing root's default shell.

I don't quite understand your question. I doubt that RH will consider changing the default shell from bash, though you could always open a bugzilla request at https://bugzilla.redhat.com. ArchLinux has zsh as their default shell on the LiveCD (though bash is the default if installed). I doubt that any mainstream distribution is going to change the default shell from bash in the near future, and I think that if RedHat (and CentOS is created from RedHat) did that, there would be lot of anger.

This is one of those cases where the vast majority of users wouldn't want such a change, in my opinion. It's easy to change your own default shell to fish. I don't know what would happen if you change root's shell, probably nothing.
New users should check the FAQ and Read Me First pages

User avatar
TrevorH
Site Admin
Posts: 33202
Joined: 2009/09/24 10:40:56
Location: Brighton, UK

Re: why Centos uses tcsh as default shell ?

Post by TrevorH » 2015/02/16 15:05:46

CentOS doesn't even ship fish let alone make it default!
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

sanfx
Posts: 3
Joined: 2015/02/15 14:37:08

Re: why Centos uses tcsh as default shell ?

Post by sanfx » 2015/02/16 17:23:04

TrevorH wrote:CentOS doesn't even ship fish let alone make it default!
So you are trying to tell that fish shell is a fancy little toy ?

User avatar
jlehtone
Posts: 4523
Joined: 2007/12/11 08:17:33
Location: Finland

Re: why Centos uses tcsh as default shell ?

Post by jlehtone » 2015/03/14 19:18:10

No.

CentOS offers the same shells that the upstream vendor does. If you want fish in that pool, you have to affect the upstream.

It seems that you can install fish from opensuse's repo.

You can as user change the default shell of your account.
You can, as admin, set the shell for accounts. That is site customization.

(I, for example, have loaned the "grep shows match in color" setting from Fedora to CentOS [56].)

scottro
Forum Moderator
Posts: 2556
Joined: 2007/09/03 21:18:09
Location: NYC
Contact:

Re: why Centos uses tcsh as default shell ?

Post by scottro » 2015/03/14 22:19:46

How do you get the impression that we are saying it's a fancy little toy? You may wish to open a bugzilla report, asking that it be included as are a few other shells besides bash. Otherwise, you can probably build and install it from source.

By the way, in case it isn't clear, these forums aren't where you might submit such a request--while some of the CentOS developers may, on occasion, view the forums, these forums are primarily users helping other users.

Judging by its home page, it has its own packages for CentOS (untested by me) so go ahead and use it if you wish. You can install it, then use the chsh command to make it your primary user's default shell.
New users should check the FAQ and Read Me First pages

Post Reply