tcsh

Perl is everywhere almost by default and it's more compatible as it has just one implementation, without sh/bash/csh/ksh/tcsh/zsh madness.

On FreeBSD, for example, the default shell is /bin/tcsh but scripts are usually written for /bin/sh (with a shebang line).

If you want to be portable across Linuxes, you can't even count on tcsh or env being installed at the same path.

The required steps (step) to setup tcsh for tab completion can be found i.e.

The base FreeBSD installation comes with 2 shells - tcsh and sh (not bash!).

Not only can Tcsh list complentions, but it can do it in color.

SUA has older versions of tcsh, ksh, vi and many other utilities, including an older Perl and an old GCC toolchain that does work.

And moreover, modern tcsh is quite a powerful and full-featured shell, too.

Does anybody know how to escape curly braces on tcsh?

Most systems will have at least bash, csh or tcsh.

My solaris is default to tcsh but with bash installed, am I affected?

And you are correct, scsh is really cool but two jobs later some random dude on pager duty at 2am is more likely to know bash or tcsh.

Using env may be slightly more portable if you're using an exotic login shell that doesn't support the "FOO=1 program" syntax - say, tcsh.

In some shells (such as tcsh) it is a built-in command like "if" or "cd".

Bash (and for sure also tcsh or zsh, not to start any flamewar) has a nice builtin tcp-socket interface by redirecting to the "pseudo" tcp device, so you don't even need nc for it on most current unices.

I had a problem with scripts (reeeeeally hairy scripts with intertwined tcl and shell code, the tcl being used to drive some really obscure software) that failed when called from tcsh scripts which didn't have "-f" in them, and the user's.tcshrc had stty -ixon in it.