Chapter 4. Understanding Shells

The Solaris 9 Operating Environment provides six shells for use as command interpreters. The three basic shells are the Bourne shell (the default), the C shell, and the Korn shell. In addition, the Solaris 9 Operating Environment includes three freeware shells: the Bourne-Again shell (bash), the TC shell (tcsh), and the Z shell (zsh). One shell is defined as the default shell for each user, but users can start a new shell from the command line. This chapter describes elements that are common to all shells and then provides a section for each shell that describes some of the prevalent shell features.

The root account uses the Bourne shell because it is statically linked and does not require any commands from the /usr account to function.

Table 27 lists the basic shell features and shows which shells provide each feature.

Table 27. Basic Features of Bourne, Bourne-Again, Korn, Z, C, and TC Shells

Feature	Bourne	bash	Korn	zsh	C	tcsh
Aliases.	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Command-line editing.	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Enhanced cd.	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
History list.	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Ignore CTRL-D (ignoreeof).	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
.profile initialization file.	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
.cshrc initialization file.	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Supplementary initialization file, for example, ksh-env file.	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Job control.	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Logout file.	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Protection of files from overwriting (noclobber).	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Syntax compatible with Bourne shell.	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No