TCSH(1) General Commands Manual TCSH(1)
NAME
tcsh — C shell with file name completion and command line editing
SYNOPSIS
tcsh [-bcdefFimnqstvVxX] [-Dname[=value]] [arg] ...
tcsh -l
DESCRIPTION
tcsh is an enhanced but completely compatible version of the Berkeley
UNIX C shell, csh(1). It is a command language interpreter usable both
as an interactive login shell and a shell script command processor. It
includes a command-line editor (see “The command-line editor (+)”), pro-
grammable word completion (see “Completion and listing (+)”), spelling
correction (see “Spelling correction (+)”), a history mechanism (see
“History substitution”), job control (see “Jobs”) and a C-like syntax.
The “NEW FEATURES (+)” section describes major enhancements of tcsh over
csh(1). Throughout this manual, features of tcsh not found in most
csh(1) implementations (specifically, the 4.4BSD csh(1)) are labeled
with ‘(+)’, and features which are present in csh(1) but not usually
documented are labeled with ‘(u)’.
Argument list processing
If the first argument (argument 0) to the shell is ‘-’ then it is a lo-
gin shell. A login shell can be also specified by invoking the shell
with the -l flag as the only argument.
The rest of the flag arguments are interpreted as follows:
-b Forces a “break” from option processing, causing any further
shell arguments to be treated as non-option arguments. The re-
maining arguments will not be interpreted as shell options.
This may be used to pass options to a shell script without con-
fusion or possible subterfuge. The shell will not run a set-
user ID script without this option.
-c Commands are read from the following argument (which must be
present, and must be a single argument), stored in the command
shell variable for reference, and executed. Any remaining argu-
ments are placed in the argv shell variable.
-d The shell loads the directory stack from ~/.cshdirs as described
under “Startup and shutdown”, whether or not it is a login
shell. (+)
-Dname[=value]
Sets the environment variable name to value. (Domain/OS only)
(+)
-e The shell exits if any invoked command terminates abnormally or
yields a non-zero exit status.
-f The shell does not load any resource or startup files, or per-
form any command hashing, and thus starts faster.
-F The shell uses fork(2) instead of vfork(2) to spawn processes.
(+)
-i The shell is interactive and prompts for its top-level input,
even if it appears to not be a terminal. Shells are interactive
without this option if their inputs and outputs are terminals.
-l The shell is a login shell. Applicable only if -l is the only
flag specified.
-m The shell loads ~/.tcshrc even if it does not belong to the ef-
fective user. Newer versions of su(1) can pass -m to the shell.
(+)
-n The shell parses commands but does not execute them. This aids
in debugging shell scripts.
-q The shell accepts SIGQUIT (see “Signal handling”) and behaves
when it is used under a debugger. Job control is disabled. (u)
-s Command input is taken from the standard input.
-t The shell reads and executes a single line of input. A ‘\’ may
be used to escape the newline at the end of this line and con-
tinue onto another line.
-v Sets the verbose shell variable, so that command input is echoed
after history substitution.
-x Sets the echo shell variable, so that commands are echoed imme-
diately before execution.
-V Sets the verbose shell variable even before executing ~/.tcshrc.
-X Is to -x as -V is to -v.
--help Print a help message on the standard output and exit. (+)
--version
Print the version/platform/compilation options on the standard
output and exit. This information is also contained in the
version shell variable. (+)
After processing of flag arguments, if arguments remain but none of the
-c, -i, -s, or -t options were given, the first argument is taken as the
name of a file of commands, or “script”, to be executed. The shell
opens this file and saves its name for possible resubstitution by ‘$0’.
Because many systems use either the standard version 6 or version 7
shells whose shell scripts are not compatible with this shell, the shell
uses such a “standard” shell to execute a script whose first character
is not a ‘#’, i.e., that does not start with a comment.
Remaining arguments are placed in the argv shell variable.
Startup and shutdown
A login shell begins by executing commands from the system files
/etc/csh.cshrc and /etc/csh.login. It then executes commands from files
in the user's home directory: first ~/.tcshrc (+) or, if ~/.tcshrc is
not found, ~/.cshrc, then the contents of ~/.history (or the value of
the histfile shell variable) are loaded into memory, then ~/.login, and
finally ~/.cshdirs (or the value of the dirsfile shell variable) (+).
The shell may read /etc/csh.login before instead of after
/etc/csh.cshrc, and ~/.login before instead of after ~/.tcshrc or
~/.cshrc and ~/.history, if so compiled; see the version shell variable.
(+)
Non-login shells read only /etc/csh.cshrc and ~/.tcshrc or ~/.cshrc on
startup.
For examples of startup files, please consult:
http://tcshrc.sourceforge.net
Commands like stty(1) and tset(1), which need be run only once per lo-
gin, usually go in one's ~/.login file. Users who need to use the same
set of files with both csh(1) and tcsh can have only a ~/.cshrc which
checks for the existence of the tcsh shell variable before using
tcsh-specific commands, or can have both a ~/.cshrc and a ~/.tcshrc
which sources (see the builtin command) ~/.cshrc. The rest of this man-
ual uses ~/.tcshrc to mean ~/.tcshrc or, if ~/.tcshrc is not found,
~/.cshrc.
In the normal case, the shell begins reading commands from the terminal,
prompting with
>
(Processing of arguments and the use of the shell to process files con-
taining command scripts are described later.) The shell repeatedly
reads a line of command input, breaks it into words, places it on the
command history list, parses it and executes each command in the line.
One can log out by typing ^D on an empty line, logout or login or via
the shell's autologout mechanism (see the autologout shell variable).
When a login shell terminates it sets the logout shell variable to
‘normal’ or ‘automatic’ as appropriate, then executes commands from the
files /etc/csh.logout and ~/.logout. The shell may drop DTR on logout
if so compiled; see the version shell variable.
The names of the system login and logout files vary from system to sys-
tem for compatibility with different csh(1) variants; see “FILES”.
Editing
We first describe “The command-line editor (+)”. The “Completion and
listing (+)” and “Spelling correction (+)” sections describe two sets of
functionality that are implemented as editor commands but which deserve
their own treatment. Finally, “Editor commands (+)” lists and describes
the editor commands specific to the shell and their default bindings.
The command-line editor (+)
Command-line input can be edited using key sequences much like those
used in emacs(1) or vi(1). The editor is active only when the edit
shell variable is set, which it is by default in interactive shells.
The bindkey builtin can display and change key bindings to editor com-
mands (see “Editor commands (+)”). emacs(1)-style key bindings are used
by default (unless the shell was compiled otherwise; see the version
shell variable), but bindkey can change the key bindings to vi(1)-style
bindings en masse.
The shell always binds the arrow keys (as defined in the TERMCAP envi-
ronment variable) to editor commands:
Key Editor command
down down-history
up up-history
left backward-char
right forward-char
unless doing so would alter another single-character binding. One can
set the arrow key escape sequences to the empty string with settc to
prevent these bindings. The ANSI/VT100 sequences for arrow keys are al-
ways bound.
Other key bindings are, for the most part, what emacs(1) and vi(1) users
would expect and can easily be displayed by bindkey, so there is no need
to list them here. Likewise, bindkey can list the editor commands with
a short description of each. Certain key bindings have different behav-
ior depending if emacs(1) or vi(1)-style bindings are being used; see
vimode for more information.
Note that editor commands do not have the same notion of a “word” as
does the shell. The editor delimits words with any non-alphanumeric
characters not in the shell variable wordchars, while the shell recog-
nizes only whitespace and some of the characters with special meanings
to it, listed under “Lexical structure”.
Completion and listing (+)
The shell is often able to complete words when given a unique abbrevia-
tion. For example, typing part of a word
ls /usr/lost
and hit the tab key to run the complete-word editor command. The shell
completes the filename /usr/lost to /usr/lost+found/, replacing the in-
complete word with the complete word in the input buffer. (Note the
terminal ‘/’; completion adds a ‘/’ to the end of completed directories
and a space to the end of other completed words, to speed typing and
provide a visual indicator of successful completion. The addsuffix
shell variable can be unset to prevent this.) If no match is found
(perhaps /usr/lost+found doesn't exist), the terminal bell rings. If
the word is already complete (perhaps there is a /usr/lost on your sys-
tem, or perhaps you were thinking too far ahead and typed the whole
thing) a ‘/’ or space is added to the end if it isn't already there.
Completion works anywhere in the line, not at just the end; completed
text pushes the rest of the line to the right. Completion in the middle
of a word often results in leftover characters to the right of the cur-
sor that need to be deleted.
Commands and variables can be completed in much the same way. For exam-
ple, typing
em[tab]
would complete ‘em’ to ‘emacs’ if ‘emacs’ were the only command on your
system beginning with ‘em’. Completion can find a command in any direc-
tory in path or if given a full pathname.
Typing
echo $ar[tab]
would complete ‘$ar’ to ‘$argv’ if no other variable began with ‘ar’.
The shell parses the input buffer to determine whether the word you want
to complete should be completed as a filename, command or variable. The
first word in the buffer and the first word following ‘;’, ‘|’, ‘|&’,
‘&&’, or ‘||’ is considered to be a command. A word beginning with ‘$’
is considered to be a variable. Anything else is a filename. An empty
line is “completed” as a filename.
You can list the possible completions of a word at any time by typing ^D
to run the delete-char-or-list-or-eof editor command. The shell lists
the possible completions using the ls-F builtin and reprints the prompt
and unfinished command line, for example:
> ls /usr/l[^D]
lbin/ lib/ local/ lost+found/
> ls /usr/l
If the autolist shell variable is set, the shell lists the remaining
choices (if any) whenever completion fails:
> set autolist
> nm /usr/lib/libt[tab]
libtermcap.a@ libtermlib.a@
> nm /usr/lib/libterm
If the autolist shell variable is set to ‘ambiguous’, choices are listed
only when completion fails and adds no new characters to the word being
completed.
A filename to be completed can contain variables, your own or others'
home directories abbreviated with ‘~’ (see “Filename substitution”) and
directory stack entries abbreviated with ‘=’ (see “Directory stack
substitution (+)”). For example,
> ls ~k[^D]
kahn kas kellogg
> ls ~ke[tab]
> ls ~kellogg/
or
> set local = /usr/local
> ls $lo[tab]
> ls $local/[^D]
bin/ etc/ lib/ man/ src/
> ls $local/
Note that variables can also be expanded explicitly with the
expand-variables editor command.
delete-char-or-list-or-eof lists at only the end of the line; in the
middle of a line it deletes the character under the cursor and on an
empty line it logs one out or, if the ignoreeof variable is set, does
nothing. M-^D, bound to the editor command list-choices, lists comple-
tion possibilities anywhere on a line, and list-choices (or any one of
the related editor commands that do or don't delete, list and/or log
out, listed under delete-char-or-list-or-eof) can be bound to ^D with
the bindkey builtin command if so desired.
The complete-word-fwd and complete-word-back editor commands (not bound
to any keys by default) can be used to cycle up and down through the
list of possible completions, replacing the current word with the next
or previous word in the list.
The shell variable fignore can be set to a list of suffixes to be ig-
nored by completion. Consider the following:
> ls
Makefile condiments.h~ main.o side.c
README main.c meal side.o
condiments.h main.c~
> set fignore = (.o \~)
> emacs ma[^D]
main.c main.c~ main.o
> emacs ma[tab]
> emacs main.c
‘main.c~’ and ‘main.o’ are ignored by completion (but not listing), be-
cause they end in suffixes in fignore. Note that a ‘\’ was needed in
front of ‘~’ to prevent it from being expanded to home as described un-
der “Filename substitution”. fignore is ignored if only one completion
is possible.
If the complete shell variable is set to ‘enhance’, completion 1) ig-
nores case and 2) considers periods, hyphens and underscores (‘.’, ‘-’,
and ‘_’) to be word separators and hyphens and underscores to be equiva-
lent. If you had the following files
comp.lang.c comp.lang.perl comp.std.c++
comp.lang.c++ comp.std.c
and typed
mail -f c.l.c[tab]
it would be completed to
mail -f comp.lang.c
and typing
mail -f c.l.c[^D]
would list ‘comp.lang.c’ and ‘comp.lang.c++’.
Typing
mail -f c..c++[^D]
would list ‘comp.lang.c++’ and ‘comp.std.c++’.
Typing
rm a--file[^D]
in the following directory
A_silly_file a-hyphenated-file another_silly_file
would list all three files, because case is ignored and hyphens and un-
derscores are equivalent. Periods, however, are not equivalent to hy-
phens or underscores.
If the complete shell variable is set to ‘Enhance’, completion ignores
case and differences between a hyphen and an underscore word separator
only when the user types a lowercase character or a hyphen. Entering an
uppercase character or an underscore will not match the corresponding
lowercase character or hyphen word separator.
Typing
rm a--file[^D]
in the directory of the previous example would still list all three
files, but typing
rm A--file
would match only ‘A_silly_file’ and typing
rm a__file[^D]
would match just ‘A_silly_file’ and ‘another_silly_file’ because the
user explicitly used an uppercase or an underscore character.
Completion and listing are affected by several other shell variables:
recexact can be set to complete on the shortest possible unique match,
even if more typing might result in a longer match:
> ls
fodder foo food foonly
> set recexact
> rm fo[tab]
just beeps, because ‘fo’ could expand to ‘fod’ or ‘foo’, but if we type
another ‘o’,
> rm foo[tab]
> rm foo
the completion completes on ‘foo’, even though ‘food’ and ‘foonly’ also
match. autoexpand can be set to run the expand-history editor command
before each completion attempt, autocorrect can be set to spelling-cor-
rect the word to be completed (see “Spelling correction (+)”) before
each completion attempt and correct can be set to complete commands au-
tomatically after one hits return. matchbeep can be set to make comple-
tion beep or not beep in a variety of situations, and nobeep can be set
to never beep at all. nostat can be set to a list of directories and/or
patterns that match directories to prevent the completion mechanism from
stat(2)ing those directories. listmax and listmaxrows can be set to
limit the number of items and rows (respectively) that are listed with-
out asking first. recognize_only_executables can be set to make the
shell list only executables when listing commands, but it is quite slow.
Finally, the complete builtin command can be used to tell the shell how
to complete words other than filenames, commands and variables. Comple-
tion and listing do not work on glob-patterns (see “Filename
substitution”), but the list-glob and expand-glob editor commands per-
form equivalent functions for glob-patterns.
Spelling correction (+)
The shell can sometimes correct the spelling of filenames, commands and
variable names as well as completing and listing them.
Individual words can be spelling-corrected with the spell-word editor
command (usually bound to M-s and M-S) and the entire input buffer with
spell-line (usually bound to M-$). The correct shell variable can be
set to ‘cmd’ to correct the command name or ‘all’ to correct the entire
line each time return is typed, and autocorrect can be set to correct
the word to be completed before each completion attempt.
When spelling correction is invoked in any of these ways and the shell
thinks that any part of the command line is misspelled, it prompts with
the corrected line:
> set correct = cmd
> lz /usr/bin
CORRECT>ls /usr/bin (y|n|e|a)?
One can answer ‘y’ or space to execute the corrected line, ‘e’ to leave
the uncorrected command in the input buffer, ‘a’ to abort the command as
if ^C had been hit, and anything else to execute the original line un-
changed.
Spelling correction recognizes user-defined completions (see the
complete builtin command). If an input word in a position for which a
completion is defined resembles a word in the completion list, spelling
correction registers a misspelling and suggests the latter word as a
correction. However, if the input word does not match any of the possi-
ble completions for that position, spelling correction does not register
a misspelling.
Like completion, spelling correction works anywhere in the line, pushing
the rest of the line to the right and possibly leaving extra characters
to the right of the cursor.
Editor commands (+)
bindkey lists key bindings and bindkey -l lists and briefly describes
editor commands. Only new or especially interesting editor commands are
described here. See emacs(1) and vi(1) for descriptions of each edi-
tor's key bindings.
The character or characters to which each command is bound by default is
given in parentheses. ^character means a control character and
M-character a meta character, typed as escape-character (or ^[character)
on terminals without a meta key. Case counts, but commands that are
bound to letters by default are bound to both lower- and uppercase let-
ters for convenience.
Supported editor commands are:
backward-char (^B, left)
Move back a character. Cursor behavior modified by vimode.
backward-delete-word (M-^H, M-^?)
Cut from beginning of current word to cursor - saved in cut
buffer. Word boundary behavior modified by vimode.
backward-word (M-b, M-B)
Move to beginning of current word. Word boundary and cursor be-
havior modified by vimode.
beginning-of-line (^A, home)
Move to beginning of line. Cursor behavior modified by vimode.
capitalize-word (M-c, M-C)
Capitalize the characters from cursor to end of current word.
Word boundary behavior modified by vimode.
complete-word (tab)
Completes a word as described under “Completion and listing
(+)”.
complete-word-back (not bound)
Like complete-word-fwd, but steps up from the end of the list.
complete-word-fwd (not bound)
Replaces the current word with the first word in the list of
possible completions. May be repeated to step down through the
list. At the end of the list, beeps and reverts to the incom-
plete word.
complete-word-raw (^X-tab)
Like complete-word, but ignores user-defined completions.
copy-prev-word (M-^_)
Copies the previous word in the current line into the input
buffer. See also insert-last-word. Word boundary behavior mod-
ified by vimode.
dabbrev-expand (M-/)
Expands the current word to the most recent preceding one for
which the current is a leading substring, wrapping around the
history list (once) if necessary. Repeating dabbrev-expand
without any intervening typing changes to the next previous word
etc., skipping identical matches much like
history-search-backward does.
delete-char (not bound)
Deletes the character under the cursor. See also
delete-char-or-list-or-eof. Cursor behavior modified by vimode.
delete-char-or-eof (not bound)
Does delete-char if there is a character under the cursor or
end-of-file on an empty line. See also
delete-char-or-list-or-eof. Cursor behavior modified by vimode.
delete-char-or-list (not bound)
Does delete-char if there is a character under the cursor or
list-choices at the end of the line. See also
delete-char-or-list-or-eof.
delete-char-or-list-or-eof (^D)
Does delete-char if there is a character under the cursor,
list-choices at the end of the line or end-of-file on an empty
line. See also those three commands, each of which does only a
single action, and delete-char-or-eof, delete-char-or-list, and
list-or-eof, each of which does a different two out of the
three.
delete-word (M-d, M-D)
Cut from cursor to end of current word - save in cut buffer.
Word boundary behavior modified by vimode.
down-history (down, ^N)
Like up-history, but steps down, stopping at the original input
line.
downcase-word (M-l, M-L)
Lowercase the characters from cursor to end of current word.
Word boundary behavior modified by vimode.
end-of-file (not bound)
Signals an end of file, causing the shell to exit unless the
ignoreeof shell variable is set to prevent this. See also
delete-char-or-list-or-eof.
end-of-line (^E, end)
Move cursor to end of line. Cursor behavior modified by vimode.
expand-history (M-space)
Expands history substitutions in the current word. See “History
substitution”. See also magic-space, toggle-literal-history,
and the autoexpand shell variable.
expand-glob (^X-*)
Expands the glob-pattern to the left of the cursor. See
“Filename substitution”.
expand-line (not bound)
Like expand-history, but expands history substitutions in each
word in the input buffer.
expand-variables (^X-$)
Expands the variable to the left of the cursor. See “Variable
substitution”.
forward-char (^F, right)
Move forward one character. Cursor behavior modified by vimode.
forward-word (M-f, M-F)
Move forward to end of current word. Word boundary and cursor
behavior modified by vimode.
history-search-backward (M-p, M-P)
Searches backwards through the history list for a command begin-
ning with the current contents of the input buffer up to the
cursor and copies it into the input buffer. The search string
may be a glob-pattern (see “Filename substitution”) containing
‘*’, ‘?’, ‘[]’, or ‘{}’. up-history and down-history will pro-
ceed from the appropriate point in the history list. Emacs mode
only. See also history-search-forward and i-search-back.
history-search-forward (M-n, M-N)
Like history-search-backward, but searches forward.
i-search-back (not bound)
Searches backward like history-search-backward, copies the first
match into the input buffer with the cursor positioned at the
end of the pattern, and prompts with
bck:
and the first match. Additional characters may be typed to ex-
tend the search, i-search-back may be typed to continue search-
ing with the same pattern, wrapping around the history list if
necessary, (i-search-back must be bound to a single character
for this to work) or one of the following special characters may
be typed:
Key Behavior
^W Appends the rest of the word under the cursor to
the search pattern.
delete (or any character bound to backward-delete-char)
Undoes the effect of the last character typed and
deletes a character from the search pattern if ap-
propriate.
^G If the previous search was successful, aborts the
entire search. If not, goes back to the last suc-
cessful search.
escape Ends the search, leaving the current line in the
input buffer.
Any other character not bound to self-insert-command terminates
the search, leaving the current line in the input buffer, and is
then interpreted as normal input. In particular, a carriage re-
turn causes the current line to be executed. See also
i-search-fwd and history-search-backward. Word boundary behav-
ior modified by vimode.
i-search-fwd (not bound)
Like i-search-back, but searches forward. Word boundary behav-
ior modified by vimode.
insert-last-word (M-_)
Inserts the last word of the previous input line (‘!$’) into the
input buffer. See also copy-prev-word.
list-choices (M-^D)
Lists completion possibilities as described under “Completion
and listing (+)”. See also delete-char-or-list-or-eof and
list-choices-raw.
list-choices-raw (^X-^D)
Like list-choices, but ignores user-defined completions.
list-glob (^X-g, ^X-G)
Lists (via the ls-F builtin) matches to the glob-pattern (see
“Filename substitution”) to the left of the cursor.
list-or-eof (not bound)
Does list-choices or end-of-file on an empty line. See also
delete-char-or-list-or-eof.
magic-space (not bound)
Expands history substitutions in the current line, like
expand-history, and inserts a space. magic-space is designed to
be bound to the space bar, but is not bound by default.
normalize-command (^X-?)
Searches for the current word in PATH and, if it is found, re-
places it with the full path to the executable. Special charac-
ters are quoted. Aliases are expanded and quoted but commands
within aliases are not. This command is useful with commands
that take commands as arguments, e.g., ‘dbx’ and ‘sh -x’.
normalize-path (^X-n, ^X-N)
Expands the current word as described under the ‘expand’ setting
of the symlinks shell variable.
overwrite-mode (unbound)
Toggles between input and overwrite modes.
run-fg-editor (M-^Z)
Saves the current input line and looks for a stopped job where
the file name portion of its first word is found in the editors
shell variable. If editors is not set, then the file name por-
tion of the EDITOR environment variable (‘ed’ if unset) and the
VISUAL environment variable (‘vi’ if unset) will be used. If
such a job is found, it is restarted as if ‘fg %job’ had been
typed. This is used to toggle back and forth between an editor
and the shell easily. Some people bind this command to ^Z so
they can do this even more easily.
run-help (M-h, M-H)
Searches for documentation on the current command, using the
same notion of “current command” as the completion routines, and
prints it. There is no way to use a pager; run-help is designed
for short help files. If the special alias helpcommand is de-
fined, it is run with the command name as a sole argument.
Else, documentation should be in a file named command.help,
command.1, command.6, command.8, or command, which should be in
one of the directories listed in the HPATH environment variable.
If there is more than one help file only the first is printed.
self-insert-command (text characters)
In insert mode (the default), inserts the typed character into
the input line after the character under the cursor. In over-
write mode, replaces the character under the cursor with the
typed character. The input mode is normally preserved between
lines, but the inputmode shell variable can be set to ‘insert’
or ‘overwrite’ to put the editor in that mode at the beginning
of each line. See also overwrite-mode.
sequence-lead-in (arrow prefix, meta prefix, ^X)
Indicates that the following characters are part of a multi-key
sequence. Binding a command to a multi-key sequence really cre-
ates two bindings: the first character to sequence-lead-in and
the whole sequence to the command. All sequences beginning with
a character bound to sequence-lead-in are effectively bound to
undefined-key unless bound to another command.
spell-line (M-$)
Attempts to correct the spelling of each word in the input
buffer, like spell-word, but ignores words whose first character
is one of ‘-’, ‘!’, ‘^’, or ‘%’, or which contain ‘\’, ‘*’, or
‘?’, to avoid problems with switches, substitutions and the
like. See “Spelling correction (+)”.
spell-word (M-s, M-S)
Attempts to correct the spelling of the current word as de-
scribed under “Spelling correction (+)”. Checks each component
of a word which appears to be a pathname.
toggle-literal-history (M-r, M-R)
Expands or unexpands history substitutions in the input buffer.
See also expand-history and the autoexpand shell variable.
undefined-key (any unbound key)
Beeps.
up-history (up, ^P)
Copies the previous entry in the history list into the input
buffer. If histlit is set, uses the literal form of the entry.
May be repeated to step up through the history list, stopping at
the top.
upcase-word (M-u, M-U)
Uppercase the characters from cursor to end of current word.
Word boundary behavior modified by vimode.
vi-beginning-of-next-word (not bound)
Vi goto the beginning of next word. Word boundary and cursor
behavior modified by vimode.
vi-eword (not bound)
Vi move to the end of the current word. Word boundary behavior
modified by vimode.
vi-search-back (?)
Prompts with
?
for a search string (which may be a glob-pattern, as with
history-search-backward), searches for it and copies it into the
input buffer. The bell rings if no match is found. Hitting re-
turn ends the search and leaves the last match in the input
buffer. Hitting escape ends the search and executes the match.
vi mode only.
vi-search-fwd (/)
Like vi-search-back, but searches forward.
which-command (M-?)
Does a which (see the description of the builtin command) on the
first word of the input buffer.
yank-pop (M-y)
When executed immediately after a yank or another yank-pop, re-
places the yanked string with the next previous string from the
killring. This also has the effect of rotating the killring,
such that this string will be considered the most recently
killed by a later yank command. Repeating yank-pop will cycle
through the killring any number of times.
Lexical structure
The shell splits input lines into words at blanks and tabs. The special
characters ‘&’, ‘|’, ‘;’, ‘<’, ‘>’, ‘(’, and ‘)’, and the doubled char-
acters ‘&&’, ‘||’, ‘<<’, and ‘>>’ are always separate words, whether or
not they are surrounded by whitespace.
When the shell's input is not a terminal, the character ‘#’ is taken to
begin a comment. Each ‘#’ and the rest of the input line on which it
appears is discarded before further parsing.
A special character (including a blank or tab) may be prevented from
having its special meaning, and possibly made part of another word, by
preceding it with a backslash (‘\’) or enclosing it in single (‘'’),
double (‘"’), or backward (‘`’) quotes. When not otherwise quoted a
newline preceded by a ‘\’ is equivalent to a blank, but inside quotes
this sequence results in a newline.
Furthermore, all “Substitutions” except “History substitution” can be
prevented by enclosing the strings (or parts of strings) in which they
appear with single quotes or by quoting the crucial character(s) (e.g.,
‘$’ or ‘`’ for “Variable substitution” or “Command substitution” respec-
tively) with ‘\’. (“Alias substitution” is no exception: quoting in any
way any character of a word for which an alias has been defined prevents
substitution of the alias. The usual way of quoting an alias is to pre-
cede it with a backslash.) “History substitution” is prevented by back-
slashes but not by single quotes. Strings quoted with double or back-
ward quotes undergo “Variable substitution” and “Command substitution”,
but other substitutions are prevented.
Text inside single or double quotes becomes a single word (or part of
one). Metacharacters in these strings, including blanks and tabs, do
not form separate words. Only in one special case (see “Command
substitution”) can a double-quoted string yield parts of more than one
word; single-quoted strings never do. Backward quotes are special: they
signal “Command substitution”, which may result in more than one word.
C-style escape sequences can be used in single quoted strings by preced-
ing the leading quote with ‘$’. (+) See “Escape sequences (+)” for a
complete list of recognized escape sequences.
Quoting complex strings, particularly strings which themselves contain
quoting characters, can be confusing. Remember that quotes need not be
used as they are in human writing! It may be easier to quote not an en-
tire string, but only those parts of the string which need quoting, us-
ing different types of quoting to do so if appropriate.
The backslash_quote shell variable can be set to make backslashes always
quote ‘\’, ‘'’, and ‘"’ (+). This may make complex quoting tasks eas-
ier, but it can cause syntax errors in csh(1) scripts.
Escape sequences (+)
The following escape sequences are always recognized inside a string
constructed using ‘$''’, and optionally by the echo builtin command as
controlled by the echo_style shell variable.
Supported escape sequences are:
Escape Description
\a Bell.
\b Backspace.
\cc The control character denoted by ‘^c’ in stty(1).
If c is a backslash, it must be doubled.
\e Escape.
\f Form feed.
\n Newline.
\r Carriage return.
\t Horizontal tab.
\v Vertical tab.
\\ Literal backslash.
\' Literal single quote.
\" Literal double quote.
\nnn The character corresponding to the octal number nnn.
\xnn The character corresponding to the hexadecimal num-
ber nn (1-2 hexadecimal digits).
\x{nnnnnnnn} The character corresponding to the hexadecimal num-
ber nnnnnnnn (1-8 hexadecimal digits).
\unnnn The Unicode code point nnnn (1-4 hexadecimal dig-
its).
\Unnnnnnnn The Unicode code point nnnnnnnn (1-8 hexadecimal
digits).
The implementations of ‘\x’, ‘\u’, and ‘\U’ in other shells may take a
varying number of digits. It is often safest to use leading zeros to
provide the maximum expected number of digits.
Substitutions
We now describe the various transformations the shell performs on the
input in the order in which they occur. We note in passing the data
structures involved and the commands and variables which affect them.
Remember that substitutions can be prevented by quoting as described un-
der “Lexical structure”.
History substitution
Each command, or “event”, input from the terminal is saved in the his-
tory list. The previous command is always saved, and the history shell
variable can be set to a number to save that many commands. The histdup
shell variable can be set to not save duplicate events or consecutive
duplicate events.
Saved commands are numbered sequentially from 1 and stamped with the
time. It is not usually necessary to use event numbers, but the current
event number can be made part of the prompt by placing an ‘!’ in the
prompt shell variable.
By default history entries are displayed by printing each parsed token
separated by space; thus the redirection operator ‘>&!’ will be dis-
played as ‘> & !’. The shell actually saves history in expanded and
literal (unexpanded) forms. If the histlit shell variable is set, com-
mands that display and store history use the literal form.
The history builtin command can print, store in a file, restore and
clear the history list at any time, and the savehist and histfile shell
variables can be set to store the history list automatically on logout
and restore it on login.
History substitutions introduce words from the history list into the in-
put stream, making it easy to repeat commands, repeat arguments of a
previous command in the current command, or fix spelling mistakes in the
previous command with little typing and a high degree of confidence.
History substitutions begin with the character ‘!’. They may begin any-
where in the input stream, but they do not nest. The ‘!’ may be pre-
ceded by a ‘\’ to prevent its special meaning; for convenience, a ‘!’ is
passed unchanged when it is followed by a blank, tab, newline, ‘=’ or
‘(’.
History substitutions also occur when an input line begins with ‘^’; see
“History substitution abbreviation”.
The characters used to signal history substitution (‘!’ and ‘^’) can be
changed by setting the histchars shell variable. Any input line which
contains a history substitution is printed before it is executed.
A history substitution may have an “event specification” (see “History
event specification”), which indicates the event from which words are to
be taken, a “word designator” (see “History word designators”), which
selects particular words from the chosen event, and/or a “word modifier”
(see “History word modifiers”), which manipulates the selected words.
History event specification
A history event specification may be one of (with the history substitu-
tion character ‘!’ shown):
!Event History event specification
!n A number, referring to a particular event.
!-n An offset, referring to the event n before the current
event.
!# The current event. This should be used carefully in
csh(1), where there is no check for recursion. tcsh al-
lows 10 levels of recursion. (+)
!! The previous event, equivalent to ‘!-1’.
!s The most recent event whose first word begins with the
string s.
!?s? The most recent event which contains the string s. The
second ‘?’ can be omitted if it is immediately followed by
a newline.
For example, consider this bit of someone's history list:
9 8:30 nroff -man wumpus.man
10 8:31 cp wumpus.man wumpus.man.old
11 8:36 vi wumpus.man
12 8:37 diff wumpus.man.old wumpus.man
The commands are shown with their event numbers and time stamps. The
current event, which we haven't typed in yet, is event 13.
Typing
!11
or
!-2
refers to event 11.
Typing
!!
refers to the previous event, 12. ‘!!’ can be abbreviated ‘!’ if it is
followed by ‘:’, which is described in “History word designators” and
“History word modifiers”.
Typing
!n
refers to event 9, which begins with ‘n’.
Typing
!?old?
refers to event 12, which contains ‘old’.
Without word designators or modifiers history references simply expand
to the entire event, so we might type
!cp
to redo the ‘cp’ command (event 10) or
!!|more
if the ‘diff’ output in the previous event, 12, scrolled off the top of
the screen.
History references may be insulated from the surrounding text with
braces (‘{’ and ‘}’) if necessary. For example,
!vdoc
would look for a command beginning with ‘vdoc’, and, in this example,
not find one, but
!{v}doc
would expand unambiguously to ‘vi wumpus.mandoc’ by matching event 11.
Even in braces, history substitutions do not nest.
(+) While csh(1) expands, for example,
!3d
to event 3 with the letter ‘d’ appended to it, tcsh expands it to the
last event beginning with ‘3d’; only completely numeric arguments are
treated as event numbers. This makes it possible to recall events be-
ginning with numbers. To expand
!3d
as in csh(1) type
!{3}d
History word designators
To select words from an event we can follow the event specification by a
‘:’ and a designator for the desired words. The words of an input line
are numbered from 0, the first (usually command) word being 0, the sec-
ond word (first argument) being 1, etc.
The basic word designators are, with columns for a leading ‘:’ and a
leading ‘!’ (for the abbreviated word designators - see “History
substitution abbreviation”):
:Word !Word History word designator
:0 The first (command) word.
:n The nth argument.
:^ !^ The first argument, equivalent to ‘:1’.
:$ !$ The last argument.
:% !% The word matched by an ?s? search.
:x-y A range of words.
:-y !-y Equivalent to ‘:0-y’.
:* !* Equivalent to ‘:^-$’, but returns nothing if the
event contains only 1 word.
:x* Equivalent to ‘:x-$’.
:x- Equivalent to ‘:x*’, but omitting the last word
(‘$’).
:- Equivalent to ‘:0-’; the command and all argu-
ments except the last argument.
Selected words are inserted into the command line separated by single
blanks.
For example, the ‘diff’ command (event 12) in the history list example
in “History event specification”,
diff wumpus.man.old wumpus.man
might have been typed as
diff !!:1.old !!:1
(using ‘:1’ to select the first argument from the previous event) or
diff !-2:2 !-2:1
to select and swap the arguments from the ‘cp’ command (event 10). If
we didn't care about the order of the ‘diff’ we might have typed
diff !-2:1-2
or simply
diff !-2:*
The ‘cp’ command (event 10) might have been typed
cp wumpus.man !#:1.old
using ‘#’ to refer to the current event.
Typing
!n:- hurkle.man
would reuse the first two words from the ‘nroff’ command (event 9) to
expand to
nroff -man hurkle.man
The ‘:’ separating the event specification from the word designator can
be omitted if the argument selector begins with a ‘^’, ‘$’, ‘%’, ‘-’, or
‘*’.
For example, our ‘diff’ command (event 12) might have been typed
diff !!^.old !!^
or, equivalently,
diff !!$.old !!$
However, if ‘!!’ is abbreviated ‘!’, an argument selector beginning with
‘-’ will be interpreted as an event specification.
A history reference may have a word designator but no event specifica-
tion. It then references the previous command.
Continuing our ‘diff’ command example (event 12), we could have typed
simply
diff !^.old !^
or, to get the arguments in the opposite order, just
diff !*
History word modifiers
The word or words in a history reference can be edited, or “modified”,
by following it with one or more modifiers (with the leading ‘:’ shown),
each preceded by a ‘:’:
:Word History word modifier
:h Remove a trailing pathname component, leaving the head.
:t Remove all leading pathname components, leaving the tail.
:r Remove a filename extension ‘.xxx’, leaving the root
name.
:e Remove all but the extension.
:u Uppercase the first lowercase letter.
:l Lowercase the first uppercase letter.
:s/l/r/ Substitute l for r. l is simply a string like r, not a
regular expression as in the eponymous ed(1) command.
Any character may be used as the delimiter in place of
‘/’; a ‘\’ can be used to quote the delimiter inside l
and r. The character ‘&’ in the r is replaced by l; ‘\’
also quotes ‘&’. If l is empty (‘’), the l from a previ-
ous substitution or the s from a previous search or event
number in event specification is used. The trailing de-
limiter may be omitted if it is immediately followed by a
newline.
:& Repeat the previous substitution.
:g Apply the following modifier once to each word.
:a (+) Apply the following modifier as many times as possible to
a single word. ‘:a’ and ‘:g’ can be used together to ap-
ply a modifier globally. With the ‘:s’ modifier, only
the patterns contained in the original word are substi-
tuted, not patterns that contain any substitution result.
:p Print the new command line but do not execute it.
:q Quote the substituted words, preventing further substitu-
tions.
:Q Same as ‘:q’ but in addition preserve empty variables as
a string containing a NUL. This is useful to preserve
positional arguments for example:
> set args=('arg 1' '' 'arg 3')
> tcsh -f -c 'echo ${#argv}' $args:gQ
3
:x Like ‘:q’, but break into words at blanks, tabs and new-
lines.
Modifiers are applied to only the first modifiable word (unless ‘:g’ is
used). It is an error for no word to be modifiable.
For example, the ‘diff’ command (event 12) in the history list example
in “History event specification”,
diff wumpus.man.old wumpus.man
might have been typed as
diff wumpus.man.old !#^:r
using ‘:r’ to remove ‘.old’ from the first argument on the same line
(‘!#^’).
We could type
echo hello out there
then
echo !*:u
to capitalize ‘hello’,
echo !*:au
to upper case the first word to ‘HELLO’, or
echo !*:agu
to upper case all words.
We might follow
mail -s "I forgot my password" rot
with
!:s/rot/root
to correct the spelling of ‘root’ (see “History word modifiers” and
“Spelling correction (+)” for different approaches).
(+) In csh(1) as such, only one modifier may be applied to each history
or variable expansion. In tcsh, more than one may be used, for example
% mv wumpus.man /usr/share/man/man1/wumpus.1
% man !$:t:r
man wumpus
In csh(1), the result would be
wumpus.1:r
A substitution followed by a ‘:’ may need to be insulated from it with
braces:
> mv a.out /usr/games/wumpus
> setenv PATH !$:h:$PATH
Bad ! modifier: $.
> setenv PATH !{-2$:h}:$PATH
setenv PATH /usr/games:/bin:/usr/bin:.
The first attempt would succeed in csh(1) but fails in tcsh, because
tcsh expects another modifier after the second ‘:’ rather than ‘$’.
History substitution abbreviation
There is a special abbreviation for substitutions; ‘^’, when it is the
first character on an input line, is equivalent to ‘!:s^’. Thus, we
might follow the example from “History word modifiers”
mail -s "I forgot my password" rot
with
^rot^root
to make the spelling correction. This is the only history substitution
which does not explicitly begin with ‘!’.
History editor commands
Finally, history can be accessed through the editor as well as through
the substitutions just described. The up-history and down-history,
history-search-backward and history-search-forward, i-search-back and
i-search-fwd, vi-search-back and vi-search-fwd, copy-prev-word and
insert-last-word editor commands search for events in the history list
and copy them into the input buffer. The toggle-literal-history editor
command switches between the expanded and literal forms of history lines
in the input buffer. expand-history and expand-line expand history sub-
stitutions in the current word and in the entire input buffer respec-
tively.
Alias substitution
The shell maintains a list of aliases which can be set, unset and
printed by the alias and unalias commands. After a command line is
parsed into simple commands (see “Commands”) the first word of each com-
mand, left-to-right, is checked to see if it has an alias. If so, the
first word is replaced by the alias. If the alias contains a history
reference, it undergoes “History substitution” as though the original
command were the previous input line. If the alias does not contain a
history reference, the argument list is left untouched.
Thus if the alias for ‘ls’ were
ls -l
the command
ls /usr
would become
ls -l /usr
the argument list here being undisturbed.
If the alias for ‘lookup’ were
grep !^ /etc/passwd
then
lookup bill
would become
grep bill /etc/passwd
Aliases can be used to introduce parser metasyntax. For example,
alias print 'pr \!* | lpr'
defines a “command” (‘print’) which pr(1)s its arguments to the line
printer.
Alias substitution is repeated until the first word of the command has
no alias. If an alias substitution does not change the first word (as
in the previous example) it is flagged to prevent a loop. Other loops
are detected and cause an error.
Some aliases are referred to by the shell; see “Special aliases (+)”.
Variable substitution
The shell maintains a list of variables, each of which has as value a
list of zero or more words. The values of shell variables can be dis-
played and changed with the set and unset commands. The system main-
tains its own list of “environment” variables. These can be displayed
and changed with printenv, setenv, and unsetenv.
(+) Variables may be made read-only with
set -r
Read-only variables may not be modified or unset; attempting to do so
will cause an error. Once made read-only, a variable cannot be made
writable, so
set -r
should be used with caution. Environment variables cannot be made read-
only.
Some variables are set by the shell or referred to by it. For instance,
the argv variable is an image of the shell's argument list, and words of
this variable's value are referred to in special ways. Some of the
variables referred to by the shell are toggles; the shell does not care
what their value is, only whether they are set or not. For instance,
the verbose variable is a toggle which causes command input to be
echoed. The -v command line option sets this variable. “Special shell
variables” lists all variables which are referred to by the shell.
Other operations treat variables numerically. The ‘@’ command permits
numeric calculations to be performed and the result assigned to a vari-
able. Variable values are, however, always represented as (zero or
more) strings. For the purposes of numeric operations, the null string
is considered to be zero, and the second and subsequent words of multi-
word values are ignored.
After the input line is aliased and parsed, and before each command is
executed, variable substitution is performed keyed by ‘$’ characters.
This expansion can be prevented by preceding the ‘$’ with a ‘\’ except
within ‘"’ pairs where it always occurs, and within ‘'’ pairs where it
never occurs. Strings quoted by ‘`’ are interpreted later (see “Command
substitution”) so ‘$’ substitution does not occur there until later, if
at all. A ‘$’ is passed unchanged if followed by a blank, tab, or end-
of-line.
Input/output redirections are recognized before variable expansion, and
are variable expanded separately. Otherwise, the command name and en-
tire argument list are expanded together. It is thus possible for the
first (command) word (to this point) to generate more than one word, the
first of which becomes the command name, and the rest of which become
arguments.
Unless enclosed in ‘"’ or given the ‘:q’ modifier the results of vari-
able substitution may eventually be command and filename substituted.
Within ‘"’, a variable whose value consists of multiple words expands to
a (portion of a) single word, with the words of the variable's value
separated by blanks. When the ‘:q’ modifier is applied to a substitu-
tion the variable will expand to multiple words with each word separated
by a blank and quoted to prevent later command or filename substitution.
The editor command expand-variables, normally bound to ^X-$, can be used
to interactively expand individual variables.
Variable substitution metasequences
The following metasequences are provided for introducing variable values
into the shell input:
$name
${name} Substitutes the words of the value of variable name,
each separated by a blank. Braces insulate name from
following characters which would otherwise be part of
it. Shell variables have names consisting of letters
and digits starting with a letter. The underscore
character is considered a letter. If name is not a
shell variable, but is set in the environment, then
that value is returned (but some of the other forms
given below are not available in this case).
$name[selector]
${name[selector]}
Substitutes only the selected words from the value of
name. The selector is subjected to ‘$’ substitution
and may consist of a single number or two numbers sepa-
rated by a ‘-’. The first word of a variable's value
is numbered ‘1’. If the first number of a range is
omitted it defaults to ‘1’. If the last member of a
range is omitted it defaults to ‘$#name’. The selector
‘*’ selects all words. It is not an error for a range
to be empty if the second argument is omitted or in
range.
$0 Substitutes the name of the file from which command in-
put is being read. An error occurs if the name is not
known.
$number
${number} Equivalent to ‘$argv[number]’.
$* Equivalent to ‘$argv’, which is equivalent to
‘$argv[*]’.
Except as noted, it is an error to reference a variable which is not
set.
The ‘:’ modifiers described under “History word modifiers”, except for
‘:p’, can be applied to the substitutions above. More than one may be
used. (+) Braces may be needed to insulate a variable substitution from
a literal ‘:’ just as with “History word modifiers”; any modifiers must
appear within the braces.
Variable substitution without modifiers
The following substitutions cannot be modified with ‘:’ modifiers:
$?name
${?name} Substitutes the string ‘1’ if name is set, ‘0’ if it
is not.
$?0 Substitutes ‘1’ if the current input filename is
known, ‘0’ if it is not. Always ‘0’ in interactive
shells.
$#name
${#name} Substitutes the number of words in name.
$# Equivalent to ‘$#argv’. (+)
$%name
${%name} Substitutes the number of characters in name. (+)
$%number
${%number} Substitutes the number of characters in
‘$argv[number]’. (+)
$? Equivalent to ‘$status’. (+)
$$ Substitutes the (decimal) process number of the (par-
ent) shell.
$! Substitutes the (decimal) process number of the last
background process started by this shell. (+)
$_ Substitutes the command line of the last command exe-
cuted. (+)
$< Substitutes a line from the standard input, with no
further interpretation thereafter. It can be used to
read from the keyboard in a shell script. (+) While
csh(1) always quotes ‘$<’, as if it were equivalent to
‘$<:q’, tcsh does not. Furthermore, when tcsh is
waiting for a line to be typed the user may type an
interrupt to interrupt the sequence into which the
line is to be substituted, but csh(1) does not allow
this.
$?< Substitutes the number of available bytes from the
standard input. (This feature might be non-portable.)
(+)
Command, filename and directory stack substitution
The remaining substitutions are applied selectively to the arguments of
builtin commands. This means that portions of expressions which are not
evaluated are not subjected to these expansions. For commands which are
not internal to the shell, the command name is substituted separately
from the argument list. This occurs very late, after input-output redi-
rection is performed, and in a child of the main shell.
Command substitution
Command substitution is indicated by a command enclosed in ‘`’. The
output from such a command is broken into separate words at blanks, tabs
and newlines, and null words are discarded. The output is variable and
command substituted and put in place of the original string.
Command substitutions inside double quotes (‘"’) retain blanks and tabs;
only newlines force new words. The single final newline does not force
a new word in any case. It is thus possible for a command substitution
to yield only part of a word, even if the command outputs a complete
line.
By default, the shell since version 6.12 replaces all newline and car-
riage return characters in the command by spaces. If this is switched
off by unsetting csubstnonl, newlines separate commands as usual.
Filename substitution
If a word contains any of the characters ‘*’, ‘?’, ‘[’, or ‘{’ or begins
with the character ‘~’ it is a candidate for filename substitution, also
known as “globbing”. This word is then regarded as a pattern
(“glob-pattern”), and replaced with an alphabetically sorted list of
file names which match the pattern.
In matching filenames, the character ‘.’ at the beginning of a filename
or immediately following a ‘/’, as well as the character ‘/’ must be
matched explicitly (unless either globdot or globstar or both are set
(+)). The character ‘*’ matches any string of characters, including the
null string. The character ‘?’ matches any single character. The se-
quence ‘[...]’ matches any one of the characters enclosed. Within
‘[...]’, a pair of characters separated by ‘-’ matches any character
lexically between the two.
(+) Some glob-patterns can be negated: The sequence ‘[^...]’ matches any
single character not specified by the characters and/or ranges of char-
acters in the braces.
An entire glob-pattern can also be negated with ‘^’:
> echo *
bang crash crunch ouch
> echo ^cr*
bang ouch
Glob-patterns which do not use ‘?’, ‘*’, or ‘[]’, or which use ‘{}’ or
‘~’ (below) are not negated correctly.
The metanotation ‘a{b,c,d}e’ is a shorthand for ‘abe ace ade’. Left-to-
right order is preserved:
/usr/source/s1/{oldls,ls}.c
expands to
/usr/source/s1/oldls.c /usr/source/s1/ls.c
The results of matches are sorted separately at a low level to preserve
this order:
../{memo,*box}
might expand to
../memo ../box ../mbox
(Note that ‘memo’ was not sorted with the results of matching ‘*box’.)
It is not an error when this construct expands to files which do not ex-
ist, but it is possible to get an error from a command to which the ex-
panded list is passed. This construct may be nested. As a special case
the words ‘{’, ‘}’, and ‘{}’ are passed undisturbed.
The character ‘~’ at the beginning of a filename refers to home directo-
ries. Standing alone, i.e., ‘~’, it expands to the invoker's home di-
rectory as reflected in the value of the home shell variable. When fol-
lowed by a name consisting of letters, digits and ‘-’ characters the
shell searches for a user with that name and substitutes their home di-
rectory; thus
~ken
might expand to
/usr/ken
and
~ken/chmach
might expand to
/usr/ken/chmach
If the character ‘~’ is followed by a character other than a letter or
‘/’ or appears elsewhere than at the beginning of a word, it is left
undisturbed. A command like
setenv MANPATH /usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:~/lib/man
does not, therefore, do home directory substitution as one might hope.
It is an error for a glob-pattern containing ‘*’, ‘?’, ‘[’, or ‘~’, with
or without ‘^’, not to match any files. However, only one pattern in a
list of glob-patterns must match a file (so that, e.g.,
rm *.a *.c *.o
would fail only if there were no files in the current directory ending
in ‘.a’, ‘.c’, or ‘.o’), and if the nonomatch shell variable is set a
pattern (or list of patterns) which matches nothing is left unchanged
rather than causing an error.
The globstar shell variable can be set to allow ‘**’ or ‘***’ as a file
glob pattern that matches any string of characters including ‘/’, recur-
sively traversing any existing sub-directories. For example,
ls **.c
will list all the .c files in the current directory tree. If used by
itself, it will match zero or more sub-directories. For example
ls /usr/include/**/time.h
will list any file named ‘time.h’ in the /usr/include directory tree;
ls /usr/include/**time.h
will match any file in the /usr/include directory tree ending in
‘time.h’; and
ls /usr/include/**time**.h
will match any .h file with ‘time’ either in a subdirectory name or in
the filename itself. To prevent problems with recursion, the ‘**’ glob-
pattern will not descend into a symbolic link containing a directory.
To override this, use ‘***’ (+)
The noglob shell variable can be set to prevent filename substitution,
and the expand-glob editor command, normally bound to ^X-*, can be used
to interactively expand individual filename substitutions.
Directory stack substitution (+)
The directory stack is a list of directories, numbered from zero, used
by the pushd, popd, and dirs builtin commands. dirs can print, store in
a file, restore and clear the directory stack at any time, and the
savedirs and dirsfile shell variables can be set to store the directory
stack automatically on logout and restore it on login. The dirstack
shell variable can be examined to see the directory stack and set to put
arbitrary directories into the directory stack.
The character ‘=’ followed by one or more digits expands to an entry in
the directory stack. The special case ‘=-’ expands to the last direc-
tory in the stack. For example,
> dirs -v
0 /usr/bin
1 /usr/spool/uucp
2 /usr/accts/sys
> echo =1
/usr/spool/uucp
> echo =0/calendar
/usr/bin/calendar
> echo =-
/usr/accts/sys
The noglob and nonomatch shell variables and the expand-glob editor com-
mand apply to directory stack as well as filename substitutions.
Other substitutions (+)
There are several more transformations involving filenames, not strictly
related to the above but mentioned here for completeness. Any filename
may be expanded to a full path when the symlinks variable is set to
‘expand’. Quoting prevents this expansion, and the normalize-path edi-
tor command does it on demand. The normalize-command editor command ex-
pands commands in PATH into full paths on demand. Finally, cd and pushd
interpret ‘-’ as the old working directory (equivalent to the shell
variable owd). This is not a substitution at all, but an abbreviation
recognized by only those commands. Nonetheless, it too can be prevented
by quoting.
Commands
The next three sections describe how the shell executes commands and
deals with their input and output.
Simple commands, pipelines and sequences
A simple command is a sequence of words, the first of which specifies
the command to be executed. A series of simple commands joined by ‘|’
characters forms a pipeline. The output of each command in a pipeline
is connected to the input of the next.
Simple commands and pipelines may be joined into sequences with ‘;’, and
will be executed sequentially. Commands and pipelines can also be
joined into sequences with ‘||’ or ‘&&’, indicating, as in the C lan-
guage, that the second is to be executed only if the first fails or suc-
ceeds respectively.
A simple command, pipeline or sequence may be placed in parentheses (‘(’
and ‘)’) to form a simple command, which may in turn be a component of a
pipeline or sequence. A command, pipeline or sequence can be executed
without waiting for it to terminate by following it with an ‘&’.
Builtin and non-builtin command execution
Builtin commands are executed within the shell. If any component of a
pipeline except the last is a builtin command, the pipeline is executed
in a subshell.
Parenthesized commands are always executed in a subshell.
(cd; pwd); pwd
thus prints the home directory, leaving you where you were (printing
this after the home directory), while
cd; pwd
leaves you in the home directory. Parenthesized commands are most often
used to prevent cd from affecting the current shell.
When a command to be executed is found not to be a builtin command the
shell attempts to execute the command via execve(2). Each word in the
variable path names a directory in which the shell will look for the
command. If the shell is not given a -f option, the shell hashes the
names in these directories into an internal table so that it will try an
execve(2) in only a directory where there is a possibility that the com-
mand resides there. This greatly speeds command location when a large
number of directories are present in the search path. This hashing
mechanism is not used:
1. If hashing is turned explicitly off via unhash.
2. If the shell was given a -f argument.
3. For each directory component of path which does not begin
with a ‘/’.
4. If the command contains a ‘/’.
In the above four cases the shell concatenates each component of the
path vector with the given command name to form a path name of a file
which it then attempts to execute it. If execution is successful, the
search stops.
If the file has execute permissions but is not an executable to the sys-
tem (i.e., it is neither an executable binary nor a script that speci-
fies its interpreter), then it is assumed to be a file containing shell
commands and a new shell is spawned to read it. The shell special alias
may be set to specify an interpreter other than the shell itself.
On systems which do not understand the ‘#!’ script interpreter conven-
tion the shell may be compiled to emulate it; see the version shell
variable. If so, the shell checks the first line of the file to see if
it is of the form
#!interpreter arg ...
If it is, the shell starts interpreter with the given args and feeds the
file to it on standard input.
Input/output
The standard input and standard output of a command may be redirected
with the following syntax:
< name Open file name (which is first variable, command and
filename expanded) as the standard input.
<< word Read the shell input up to a line which is identical to
word. word is not subjected to variable, filename or
command substitution, and each input line is compared to
word before any substitutions are done on this input
line. Unless a quoting ‘\’, ‘"’, ‘'’, or ‘`’ appears in
word variable and command substitution is performed on
the intervening lines, allowing ‘\’ to quote ‘$’, ‘\’,
and ‘`’. Commands which are substituted have all blanks,
tabs, and newlines preserved, except for the final new-
line which is dropped. The resultant text is placed in
an anonymous temporary file which is given to the command
as standard input.
> name
>! name
>& name
>&! name
The file name is used as standard output. If the file
does not exist then it is created; if the file exists, it
is truncated, its previous contents being lost.
If the shell variable noclobber is set, then the file
must not exist or be a character special file (e.g., a
terminal or /dev/null) or an error results. This helps
prevent accidental destruction of files. In this case
the ‘!’ forms can be used to suppress this check. If
‘notempty’ is given in noclobber, ‘>’ is allowed on empty
files; if ‘ask’ is given in noclobber, an interactive
confirmation is presented, rather than an error.
The forms involving ‘&’ route the diagnostic output into
the specified file as well as the standard output. name
is expanded in the same way as ‘<’ input filenames are.
>> name
>>& name
>>! name
>>&! name
Like ‘>’, but appends output to the end of name. If the
shell variable noclobber is set, then it is an error for
the file not to exist, unless one of the ‘!’ forms is
given.
A command receives the environment in which the shell was invoked as
modified by the input-output parameters and the presence of the command
in a pipeline. Thus, unlike some previous shells, commands run from a
file of shell commands have no access to the text of the commands by de-
fault; rather they receive the original standard input of the shell.
The ‘<<’ mechanism should be used to present inline data. This permits
shell command scripts to function as components of pipelines and allows
the shell to block read its input. Note that the default standard input
for a command run detached is not the empty file /dev/null, but the
original standard input of the shell. If this is a terminal and if the
process attempts to read from the terminal, then the process will block
and the user will be notified (see “Jobs”).
Diagnostic output may be directed through a pipe with the standard out-
put. Simply use the form ‘|&’ rather than just ‘|’.
The shell cannot presently redirect diagnostic output without also redi-
recting standard output, but
( command > output-file ) >& error-file
is often an acceptable workaround. Either output-file or error-file may
be /dev/tty to send output to the terminal.
Features
Having described how the shell accepts, parses and executes command
lines, we now turn to a variety of its useful features.
Control flow
The shell contains a number of commands which can be used to regulate
the flow of control in command files (shell scripts) and (in limited but
useful ways) from terminal input. These commands all operate by forcing
the shell to reread or skip in its input and, due to the implementation,
restrict the placement of some of the commands.
The foreach, switch, and while statements, as well as the if ... then
... else form of the if statement, require that the major keywords ap-
pear in a single simple command on an input line as shown below.
If the shell's input is not seekable, the shell buffers up input when-
ever a loop is being read and performs seeks in this internal buffer to
accomplish the rereading implied by the loop. (To the extent that this
allows, backward gotos will succeed on non-seekable inputs.)
Expressions
The if, while, and exit builtin commands use expressions with a common
syntax. The expressions can include any of the operators described in
the next three sections. Note that the @ builtin command has its own
separate syntax.
Logical, arithmetical and comparison operators
These operators are similar to those of C and have the same precedence.
The operators, in descending precedence, with equivalent precedence per
line, are:
( )
~
!
* / %
+ -
<< >>
<= >= < >
== != =~ !~
&
^
|
&&
||
The ‘==’ ‘!=’ ‘=~’ and ‘!~’ operators compare their arguments as
strings; all others operate on numbers. The operators ‘=~’ and ‘!~’ are
like ‘==’ and ‘!=’ except that the right hand side is a glob-pattern
(see “Filename substitution”) against which the left hand operand is
matched. This reduces the need for use of the switch builtin command in
shell scripts when all that is really needed is pattern matching.
Null or missing arguments are considered ‘0’. The results of all ex-
pressions are strings, which represent decimal numbers. It is important
to note that no two components of an expression can appear in the same
word; except when adjacent to components of expressions which are syn-
tactically significant to the parser (‘&’, ‘|’, ‘<’, ‘>’, ‘(’, ‘)’) they
should be surrounded by spaces.
Command exit status
Commands can be executed in expressions and their exit status returned
by enclosing them in braces (‘{’ and ‘}’). Remember that the braces
should be separated from the words of the command by spaces. Command
executions succeed, returning true, i.e., ‘1’, if the command exits with
status 0, otherwise they fail, returning false, i.e., ‘0’. If more de-
tailed status information is required then the command should be exe-
cuted outside of an expression and the status shell variable examined.
File inquiry operators
Some of these operators perform true/false tests on files and related
objects. They are of the form -op file, where -op is one of:
-op True/false file inquiry operator
-r Read access.
-w Write access.
-x Execute access.
-X Executable in the path or shell builtin, e.g., ‘-X ls’
and ‘-X ls-F’ are generally true, but ‘-X /bin/ls’ is
not. (+)
-e Existence.
-o Ownership.
-z Zero size.
-s Non-zero size. (+)
-f Plain file.
-d Directory.
-l Symbolic link. (+) *
-b Block special file. (+)
-c Character special file. (+)
-p Named pipe (fifo). (+) *
-S Socket special file. (+) *
-u Set-user-ID bit is set. (+)
-g Set-group-ID bit is set. (+)
-k Sticky bit is set. (+)
-t file (which must be a digit) is an open file descriptor
for a terminal device. (+)
-R Has been migrated (Convex only). (+)
-L Applies subsequent operators in a multiple-operator test
to a symbolic link rather than to the file to which the
link points. (+) *
file is command and filename expanded and then tested to see if it has
the specified relationship to the real user. If file does not exist or
is inaccessible or, for the operators indicated by ‘*’, if the specified
file type does not exist on the current system, then all inquiries re-
turn false, i.e., ‘0’.
These operators may be combined for conciseness:
-xy file
is equivalent to
-x file && -y file
(+) For example, ‘-fx’ is true (returns ‘1’) for plain executable files,
but not for directories.
-L may be used in a multiple-operator test to apply subsequent operators
to a symbolic link rather than to the file to which the link points.
For example, -lLo is true for links owned by the invoking user. -Lr,
-Lw, and -Lx are always true for links and false for non-links. -L has
a different meaning when it is the last operator in a multiple-operator
test; see below.
It is possible but not useful, and sometimes misleading, to combine op-
erators which expect file to be a file with operators which do not
(e.g., -X and -t). Following -L with a non-file operator can lead to
particularly strange results.
Other operators return other information, i.e., not just ‘0’ or ‘1’.
(+) They have the same format as before; -op may be one of:
-op Extended file inquiry operator
-A Last file access time, as the number of seconds since the
epoch.
-A: Like ‘A’, but in timestamp format, e.g., ‘Fri May 14
16:36:10 1993’.
-M Last file modification time.
-M: Like -M, but in timestamp format.
-C Last inode modification time.
-C: Like -C, but in timestamp format.
-D Device number.
-I Inode number.
-F Composite -file identifier, in the form device:inode.
-L The name of the file pointed to by a symbolic link.
-N Number of (hard) links.
-P Permissions, in octal, without leading zero.
-P: Like -P, with leading zero.
-Pmode Equivalent to
-P file & mode
For example, ‘-P22 file’ returns ‘22’ if file is writable
by group and other, ‘20’ if by group only, and ‘0’ if by
neither.
-Pmode: Like -Pmode, with leading zero.
-U Numeric userid.
-U: Username, or the numeric userid if the username is un-
known.
-G Numeric groupid.
-G: Groupname, or the numeric groupid if the groupname is un-
known.
-Z Size, in bytes.
Only one of these operators may appear in a multiple-operator test, and
it must be the last. Note that ‘L’ has a different meaning at the end
of and elsewhere in a multiple-operator test. Because ‘0’ is a valid
return value for many of these operators, they do not return ‘0’ when
they fail: most return ‘-1’, and ‘F’ returns ‘:’.
If the shell is compiled with POSIX defined (see the version shell vari-
able), the result of a file inquiry is based on the permission bits of
the file and not on the result of the access(2) system call. For exam-
ple, if one tests a file with -w whose permissions would ordinarily al-
low writing but which is on a file system mounted read-only, the test
will succeed in a POSIX shell but fail in a non-POSIX shell.
File inquiry operators can also be evaluated with the filetest builtin
command (+).
Jobs
The shell associates a job with each pipeline. It keeps a table of cur-
rent jobs, printed by the jobs command, and assigns them small integer
numbers. When a job is started asynchronously with ‘&’, the shell
prints a line which looks like
[1] 1234
indicating that the job which was started asynchronously was job number
1 and had one (top-level) process, whose process id was 1234.
If you are running a job and wish to do something else you may hit the
suspend key (usually ^Z), which sends a STOP signal to the current job.
The shell will then normally indicate that the job has been
Suspended
and print another prompt. If the listjobs shell variable is set, all
jobs will be listed like the jobs builtin command; if it is set to
‘long’ the listing will be in long format, like ‘jobs -l’. You can then
manipulate the state of the suspended job. You can put it in the
“background” with the bg command or run some other commands and eventu-
ally bring the job back into the “foreground” with fg. (See also the
run-fg-editor editor command.) A ^Z takes effect immediately and is
like an interrupt in that pending output and unread input are discarded
when it is typed. The wait builtin command causes the shell to wait for
all background jobs to complete.
The ^] key sends a delayed suspend signal, which does not generate a
STOP signal until a program attempts to read(2) it, to the current job.
This can usefully be typed ahead when you have prepared some commands
for a job which you wish to stop after it has read them. The ^Y key
performs this function in csh(1); in tcsh, ^Y is an editing command.
(+)
A job being run in the background stops if it tries to read from the
terminal. Background jobs are normally allowed to produce output, but
this can be disabled by giving the command
stty tostop
If you set this tty option, then background jobs will stop when they try
to produce output like they do when they try to read input.
There are several ways to refer to jobs in the shell. The character ‘%’
introduces a job name. If you wish to refer to job number 1, you can
name it as
%1
Just naming a job brings it to the foreground; thus
%1
is a synonym for
fg %1
bringing job 1 back into the foreground. Similarly, typing
%1 &
resumes job 1 in the background, just like
bg %1
A job can also be named by an unambiguous prefix of the string typed in
to start it:
%ex
would normally restart a suspended ex(1) job, if there were only one
suspended job whose name began with the string ‘ex’. It is also possi-
ble to type
%?string
to specify a job whose text contains string, if there is only one such
job.
The shell maintains a notion of the current and previous jobs. In out-
put pertaining to jobs, the current job is marked with a ‘+’ and the
previous job with a ‘-’. The abbreviations ‘%+’, ‘%’, and (by analogy
with the syntax of the history mechanism) ‘%%’ all refer to the current
job, and ‘%-’ refers to the previous job.
The job control mechanism requires that the stty(1) option ‘new’ be set
on some systems. It is an artifact from a “new” implementation of the
tty driver which allows generation of interrupt characters from the key-
board to tell jobs to stop. See stty(1) and the setty builtin command
for details on setting options in the new tty driver.
Status reporting
The shell learns immediately whenever a process changes state. It nor-
mally informs you whenever a job becomes blocked so that no further
progress is possible, but only right before it prints a prompt. This is
done so that it does not otherwise disturb your work. If, however, you
set the shell variable notify, the shell will notify you immediately of
changes of status in background jobs. There is also a builtin command
notify which marks a single process so that its status changes will be
immediately reported. By default notify marks the current process; sim-
ply enter
notify
after starting a background job to mark it for immediate status report-
ing.
When you try to leave the shell while jobs are stopped, you will be
warned that
There are suspended jobs.
You may use the jobs command to see what they are. If you do this or
immediately try to exit again, the shell will not warn you a second
time, and the suspended jobs will be terminated.
Automatic, periodic and timed events (+)
There are various ways to run commands and take other actions automati-
cally at various times in the “life cycle” of the shell. They are sum-
marized here, and described in detail under the appropriate “Builtin
commands”, “Special shell variables”, and “Special aliases (+)”.
The sched builtin command puts commands in a scheduled-event list, to be
executed by the shell at a given time.
The beepcmd, cwdcmd, jobcmd, periodic, precmd, and postcmd “Special
aliases (+)” can be set, respectively, to execute commands: when the
shell wants to ring the bell, when the working directory changes, when a
job is started or is brought into the foreground, every tperiod minutes,
before each prompt, and before each command gets executed.
The autologout shell variable can be set to log out or lock the shell
after a given number of minutes of inactivity.
The mail shell variable can be set to check for new mail periodically.
The printexitvalue shell variable can be set to print the exit status of
commands which exit with a status other than zero.
The rmstar shell variable can be set to ask the user, when
rm *
is typed, if that is really what was meant.
The time shell variable can be set to execute the time builtin command
after the completion of any process that takes more than a given number
of CPU seconds.
The watch and who shell variables can be set to report when selected
users log in or out, and the log builtin command reports on those users
at any time.
Native Language System support (+)
The shell is eight bit clean (if so compiled; see the version shell
variable) and thus supports character sets needing this capability. NLS
support differs depending on whether or not the shell was compiled to
use the system's NLS (again, see version). In either case, 7-bit ASCII
is the default character code (e.g., the classification of which charac-
ters are printable) and sorting, and changing the LANG or LC_CTYPE envi-
ronment variables causes a check for possible changes in these respects.
When using the system's NLS, the setlocale(3) function is called to de-
termine appropriate character code/classification and sorting (e.g.,
‘en_CA.UTF-8’ would yield ‘UTF-8’ as the character code). This function
typically examines the LANG and LC_CTYPE environment variables; refer to
the system documentation for further details. When not using the sys-
tem's NLS, the shell simulates it by assuming that the ISO 8859-1 char-
acter set is used whenever either of the LANG and LC_CTYPE variables are
set, regardless of their values. Sorting is not affected for the simu-
lated NLS.
In addition, with both real and simulated NLS, all printable characters
in the range \200-\377, i.e., those that have M-char bindings, are auto-
matically rebound to self-insert-command. The corresponding binding for
the escape-char sequence, if any, is left alone. These characters are
not rebound if the NOREBIND environment variable is set. This may be
useful for the simulated NLS or a primitive real NLS which assumes full
ISO 8859-1. Otherwise, all M-char bindings in the range \240-\377 are
effectively undone. Explicitly rebinding the relevant keys with bindkey
is of course still possible.
Unknown characters (i.e., those that are neither printable nor control
characters) are printed in the format \nnn. If the tty is not in 8 bit
mode, other 8 bit characters are printed by converting them to ASCII and
using standout mode. The shell never changes the 7/8 bit mode of the
tty and tracks user-initiated changes of 7/8 bit mode. NLS users (or,
for that matter, those who want to use a meta key) may need to explic-
itly set the tty in 8 bit mode through the appropriate stty(1) command
in, e.g., the ~/.login file.
OS variant support (+)
A number of new builtin commands are provided to support features in
particular operating systems. All are described in detail in the
“Builtin commands” section.
On systems that support TCF (aix-ibm370, aix-ps2), getspath and setspath
get and set the system execution path, getxvers and setxvers get and set
the experimental version prefix and migrate migrates processes between
sites. The jobs builtin prints the site on which each job is executing.
Under BS2000, bs2cmd executes commands of the underlying BS2000/OSD op-
erating system.
Under Domain/OS, inlib adds shared libraries to the current environment,
rootnode changes the rootnode and ver changes the systype.
Under Mach, setpath is equivalent to Mach's setpath(1).
Under Masscomp/RTU and Harris CX/UX, universe sets the universe.
Under Harris CX/UX, ucb or att runs a command under the specified uni-
verse.
Under Convex/OS, warp prints or sets the universe.
The VENDOR, OSTYPE, and MACHTYPE environment variables indicate respec-
tively the vendor, operating system and machine type (microprocessor
class or machine model) of the system on which the shell thinks it is
running. These are particularly useful when sharing one's home direc-
tory between several types of machines; one can, for example,
set path = (~/bin.$MACHTYPE /usr/ucb /bin /usr/bin .)
in one's ~/.login and put executables compiled for each machine in the
appropriate directory.
The version shell variable indicates what options were chosen when the
shell was compiled.
Note also the newgrp builtin, the afsuser and echo_style shell variables
and the system-dependent locations of the shell's input files (see
“FILES”).
Signal handling
Login shells ignore interrupts when reading the file ~/.logout. The
shell ignores quit signals unless started with -q. Login shells catch
the terminate signal, but non-login shells inherit the terminate behav-
ior from their parents. Other signals have the values which the shell
inherited from its parent.
In shell scripts, the shell's handling of interrupt and terminate sig-
nals can be controlled with onintr, and its handling of hangups can be
controlled with hup and nohup.
The shell exits on a hangup (see also the logout shell variable). By
default, the shell's children do too, but the shell does not send them a
hangup when it exits. hup arranges for the shell to send a hangup to a
child when it exits, and nohup sets a child to ignore hangups.
Terminal management (+)
The shell uses three different sets of terminal (“tty”) modes: ‘edit’,
used when editing; ‘quote’, used when quoting literal characters; and
‘execute’, used when executing commands. The shell holds some settings
in each mode constant, so commands which leave the tty in a confused
state do not interfere with the shell. The shell also matches changes
in the speed and padding of the tty. The list of tty modes that are
kept constant can be examined and modified with the setty builtin. Note
that although the editor uses CBREAK mode (or its equivalent), it takes
typed-ahead characters anyway.
The echotc, settc, and telltc commands can be used to manipulate and de-
bug terminal capabilities from the command line.
On systems that support SIGWINCH or SIGWINDOW, the shell adapts to win-
dow resizing automatically and adjusts the environment variables LINES
and COLUMNS if set. If the environment variable TERMCAP contains ‘li#’
and ‘co#’ fields, the shell adjusts them to reflect the new window size.
REFERENCE
The next sections of this manual describe all of the available “Builtin
commands”, “Special aliases (+)”, and “Special shell variables”.
Builtin commands
%job A synonym for the fg builtin command.
%job & A synonym for the bg builtin command.
: Does nothing, successfully.
@
@ name = expr
@ name[index] = expr
@ name++|--
@ name[index]++|--
The first form prints the values of all shell variables.
The second form assigns the value of expr to name.
The third form assigns the value of expr to the index'th compo-
nent of name; both name and its index'th component must already
exist.
expr may contain the operators ‘*’, ‘+’, etc., as in C. If expr
contains ‘<’, ‘>’, ‘&’, or ‘|’ then at least that part of expr
must be placed within (‘’ and ‘’). Note that the syntax of expr
has nothing to do with that described under “Expressions”.
The fourth and fifth forms increment (‘++’) or decrement (‘--’)
name or its index'th component.
The space between ‘@’ and name is required. The spaces between
name and ‘=’ and between ‘=’ and expr are optional. Components
of expr must be separated by spaces.
alias [name [wordlist]]
Without arguments, prints all aliases.
With name, prints the alias for name.
With name and wordlist, assigns wordlist as the alias of name.
wordlist is command and filename substituted.
name may not be ‘alias’ or ‘unalias’. See also the unalias
builtin command.
alloc Shows the amount of dynamic memory acquired, broken down into
used and free memory. With an argument shows the number of free
and used blocks in each size category. The categories start at
size 8 and double at each step. This command's output may vary
across system types, because systems other than the VAX may use
a different memory allocator.
bg [%job ...]
Puts the specified jobs (or, without arguments, the current job)
into the background, continuing each if it is stopped. job may
be a number, a string, ‘’, ‘%’, ‘+’, or ‘-’ as described under
“Jobs”.
bindkey [-l|-d|-e|-v|-u] (+)
bindkey [-a] [-b] [-k] [-r] [--] key (+)
bindkey [-a] [-b] [-k] [-c|-s] [--] key command (+)
The first form either lists all bound keys and the editor com-
mand to which each is bound, lists a description of the com-
mands, or binds all keys to a specific mode.
The second form lists the editor command to which key is bound.
The third form binds the editor command command to key.
Supported bindkey options:
Option bindkey description
-a Lists or changes key-bindings in the alternative key
map. This is the key map used in vimode command mode.
-b key is interpreted as a control character written
^character (e.g., ^A) or C-character (e.g., C-A), a meta
character written M-character (e.g., M-A), a function
key written F-string (e.g., F-string), or an extended
prefix key written X-character (e.g., X-A).
-c command is interpreted as a builtin or external command
instead of an editor command.
-d Binds all keys to the standard bindings for the default
editor, as per -e and -v.
-e Binds all keys to emacs(1)-style bindings. Unsets
vimode.
-k key is interpreted as a symbolic arrow key name, which
may be one of ‘down’, ‘up’, ‘left’, or ‘right’.
-l Lists all editor commands and a short description of
each.
-r Removes key's binding. Be careful: ‘bindkey -r’ does
not bind key to self-insert-command, it unbinds key com-
pletely.
-s command is taken as a literal string and treated as ter-
minal input when key is typed. Bound keys in command
are themselves reinterpreted, and this continues for ten
levels of interpretation.
-u (or any invalid option)
Prints a usage message.
-v Binds all keys to vi(1)-style bindings. Sets vimode.
-- Forces a break from option processing, so the next word
is taken as key even if it begins with ‘-’.
key may be a single character or a string. If a command is
bound to a string, the first character of the string is bound to
sequence-lead-in and the entire string is bound to the command.
Control characters in key can be literal (they can be typed by
preceding them with the editor command quoted-insert, normally
bound to ^V) or written caret-character style, e.g., ^A. Delete
is written ^? (caret-question mark). key and command can con-
tain backslashed escape sequences (in the style of System V
echo(1)) as follows:
Escape Description
\a Bell.
\b Backspace.
\e Escape.
\f Form feed.
\n Newline.
\r Carriage return.
\t Horizontal tab.
\v Vertical tab.
\nnn The ASCII character corresponding to the octal number
nnn.
‘\’ nullifies the special meaning of the following character, if
it has any, notably ‘\’ and ‘^’.
bs2cmd bs2000-command (+)
Passes bs2000-command to the BS2000 command interpreter for exe-
cution. Only non-interactive commands can be executed, and it
is not possible to execute any command that would overlay the
image of the current process, like /EXECUTE or /CALL-PROCEDURE.
(BS2000 only)
break Causes execution to resume after the end of the nearest enclos-
ing foreach or while. The remaining commands on the current
line are executed. Multi-level breaks are thus possible by
writing them all on one line.
breaksw
Causes a break from a switch, resuming after the endsw.
builtins (+)
Prints the names of all builtin commands.
bye (+)
A synonym for the logout builtin command. Available only if the
shell was so compiled; see the version shell variable.
case label:
A label in a switch statement as discussed below.
cd [-p] [-l] [-n|-v] [--] [name]
If a directory name is given, changes the shell's working direc-
tory to name. If not, changes to home, unless the cdtohome
variable is not set, in which case a name is required. If name
is ‘-’ it is interpreted as the previous working directory (see
“Other substitutions (+)”). (+) If name is not a subdirectory
of the current directory (and does not begin with ‘/’, ‘./’ or
‘../’), each component of the variable cdpath is checked to see
if it has a subdirectory name. Finally, if all else fails but
name is a shell variable whose value begins with ‘/’ or ‘.’,
then this is tried to see if it is a directory, and the -p op-
tion is implied.
With -p, prints the final directory stack, just like dirs. The
-l, -n, and -v flags have the same effect on cd as on dirs, and
they imply -p (+). Using -- forces a break from option process-
ing so the next word is taken as the directory name even if it
begins with ‘-’ (+).
See also the implicitcd and cdtohome shell variables.
chdir A synonym for the cd builtin command.
complete [command [word/pattern/list[:select]/[[suffix]/] ...]] (+)
Without arguments, lists all completions.
With command, lists completions for command.
With command and word ..., defines completions.
command may be a full command name or a glob-pattern (see
“Filename substitution”). It can begin with ‘-’ to indicate
that completion should be used only when command is ambiguous.
word specifies which word relative to the current word is to be
completed, and may be one of the following:
word Completion word
c Current-word completion. pattern is a glob-pattern
which must match the beginning of the current word
on the command line. pattern is ignored when com-
pleting the current word.
C Like ‘c’, but includes pattern when completing the
current word.
n Next-word completion. pattern is a glob-pattern
which must match the beginning of the previous word
on the command line.
N Like ‘n’, but must match the beginning of the word
two before the current word.
p Position-dependent completion. pattern is a nu-
meric range, with the same syntax used to index
shell variables, which must include the current
word.
list, the list of possible completions, may be one of the fol-
lowing:
list Completion item
a Aliases.
b Bindings (editor commands).
c Commands (builtin or external commands).
C External commands which begin with the supplied
path prefix.
d Directories.
D Directories which begin with the supplied path pre-
fix.
e Environment variables.
f Filenames.
F Filenames which begin with the supplied path pre-
fix.
g Groupnames.
j Jobs.
l Limits.
n Nothing.
s Shell variables.
S Signals.
t Plain (“text”) files.
T Plain (“text”) files which begin with the supplied
path prefix.
v Any variables.
u Usernames.
x Like ‘n’, but prints select when list-choices is
used.
X Completions.
$var Words from the variable var.
(...) Words from the given list.
`...` Words from the output of command.
select is an optional glob-pattern. If given, words from only
list that match select are considered and the fignore shell
variable is ignored. The list types ‘$var’, ‘(...)’, and
‘`...`’ may not have a select pattern, and ‘x’ uses select as an
explanatory message when the list-choices editor command is
used.
suffix is a single character to be appended to a successful com-
pletion. If null, no character is appended. If omitted (in
which case the fourth delimiter can also be omitted), a slash is
appended to directories and a space to other words.
command invoked from list ‘`...`’ has the additional environment
variable COMMAND_LINE set, which contains (as its name indi-
cates) contents of the current (already typed in) command line.
One can examine and use contents of the COMMAND_LINE environment
variable in a custom script to build more sophisticated comple-
tions (see completion for svn(1) included in this package).
Now for some examples. Some commands take only directories as
arguments, so there's no point completing plain files.
> complete cd 'p/1/d/'
completes only the first word following ‘cd’ (‘p/1’) with a di-
rectory. ‘p’-type completion can also be used to narrow down
command completion:
> co[^D]
complete compress
> complete -co* 'p/0/(compress)/'
> co[^D]
> compress
This completion completes commands (words in position 0, ‘p/0’)
which begin with ‘co’ (thus matching ‘co*’) to ‘compress’ (the
only word in the list). The leading ‘-’ indicates that this
completion is to be used with only ambiguous commands.
> complete find 'n/-user/u/'
is an example of ‘n’-type completion. Any word following ‘find’
and immediately following ‘-user’ is completed from the list of
users.
> complete cc 'c/-I/d/'
demonstrates ‘c’-type completion. Any word following ‘cc’ and
beginning with ‘-I’ is completed as a directory. ‘-I’ is not
taken as part of the directory because we used lowercase ‘c’.
Different lists are useful with different commands.
> complete alias 'p/1/a/'
> complete man 'p/*/c/'
> complete set 'p/1/s/'
> complete true 'p/1/x:Truth has no options./'
These complete words following ‘alias’ with aliases, ‘man’ with
commands, and ‘set’ with shell variables. true doesn't have any
options, so ‘x’ does nothing when completion is attempted and
prints
Truth has no options.
when completion choices are listed.
Note that the ‘man’ example, and several other examples below,
could just as well have used ‘'c/*'’ or ‘'n/*'’ as ‘'p/*'’.
Words can be completed from a variable evaluated at completion
time,
> complete ftp 'p/1/$hostnames/'
> set hostnames = (rtfm.mit.edu tesla.ee.cornell.edu)
> ftp [^D]
rtfm.mit.edu tesla.ee.cornell.edu
> ftp [^C]
> set hostnames = (rtfm.mit.edu tesla.ee.cornell.edu uunet.uu.net)
> ftp [^D]
rtfm.mit.edu tesla.ee.cornell.edu uunet.uu.net
or from a command run at completion time:
> complete kill 'p/*/`ps | awk \{print\ \$1\}`/'
> kill -9 [^D]
23113 23377 23380 23406 23429 23529 23530 PID
Note that the complete command does not itself quote its argu-
ments, so the braces, space and ‘$’ in ‘{print $1}’ must be
quoted explicitly.
One command can have multiple completions:
> complete dbx 'p/2/(core)/' 'p/*/c/'
completes the second argument to ‘dbx’ with the word ‘core’ and
all other arguments with commands. Note that the positional
completion is specified before the next-word completion. Be-
cause completions are evaluated from left to right, if the next-
word completion were specified first it would always match and
the positional completion would never be executed. This is a
common mistake when defining a completion.
The select pattern is useful when a command takes files with
only particular forms as arguments. For example,
> complete cc 'p/*/f:*.[cao]/'
completes ‘cc’ arguments to files ending in only ‘.c’, ‘.a’, or
‘.o’. select can also exclude files, using negation of a glob-
pattern as described under “Filename substitution”. One might
use
> complete rm 'p/*/f:^*.{c,h,cc,C,tex,1,man,l,y}/'
to exclude precious source code from ‘rm’ completion. Of
course, one could still type excluded names manually or override
the completion mechanism using the complete-word-raw or
list-choices-raw editor commands.
The ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘F’, and ‘T’ lists are like ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘f’, and ‘t’
respectively, but they use the select argument in a different
way: to restrict completion to files beginning with a particular
path prefix. For example, the Elm mail program uses ‘=’ as an
abbreviation for one's mail directory. One might use
> complete elm c@=@F:$HOME/Mail/@
to complete
elm -f =
as if it were
elm -f ~/Mail/
Note that we used the separator ‘@’ instead of ‘/’ to avoid con-
fusion with the select argument, and we used ‘$HOME’ instead of
‘~’ because home directory substitution works at only the begin-
ning of a word.
suffix is used to add a nonstandard suffix (not space or ‘/’ for
directories) to completed words.
> complete finger 'c/*@/$hostnames/' 'p/1/u/@'
completes arguments to ‘finger’ from the list of users, appends
an ‘@’, and then completes after the ‘@’ from the ‘hostnames’
variable. Note again the order in which the completions are
specified.
Finally, here's a complex example for inspiration:
> complete find \
'n/-name/f/' 'n/-newer/f/' 'n/-{,n}cpio/f/' \
'n/-exec/c/' 'n/-ok/c/' 'n/-user/u/' \
'n/-group/g/' 'n/-fstype/(nfs 4.2)/' \
'n/-type/(b c d f l p s)/' \
'c/-/(name newer cpio ncpio exec ok user \
group fstype type atime ctime depth inum \
ls mtime nogroup nouser perm print prune \
size xdev)/' \
'p/*/d/'
This completes words following ‘-name’, ‘-newer’, ‘-cpio’, or
‘-ncpio’ (note the pattern which matches both) to files, words
following ‘-exec’ or ‘-ok’ to commands, words following ‘-user’
and ‘-group’ to users and groups respectively and words follow-
ing ‘-fstype’ or ‘-type’ to members of the given lists. It also
completes the switches themselves from the given list (note the
use of ‘c’-type completion) and completes anything not otherwise
completed to a directory. Whew.
Remember that programmed completions are ignored if the word be-
ing completed is a tilde substitution (beginning with ‘~’) or a
variable (beginning with ‘$’). See also the uncomplete builtin
command.
continue
Continues execution of the nearest enclosing while or foreach.
The rest of the commands on the current line are executed.
default:
Labels the default case in a switch statement. It should come
after all case labels.
dirs [-l] [-n|-v]
dirs -S|-L [filename] (+)
dirs -c (+)
The first form prints the directory stack. The top of the stack
is at the left and the first directory in the stack is the cur-
rent directory. With -l, ‘~’ or ‘~name’ in the output is ex-
panded explicitly to home or the pathname of the home directory
for user name. (+) With -n, entries are wrapped before they
reach the edge of the screen. (+) With -v, entries are printed
one per line, preceded by their stack positions. (+) If more
than one of -n or -v is given, -v takes precedence. -p is ac-
cepted but does nothing.
The second form with -S saves the directory stack to filename as
a series of cd and pushd commands. The second form with -L
sources filename, which is presumably a directory stack file
saved by the -S option or the savedirs mechanism. In either
case, dirsfile is used if filename is not given and ~/.cshdirs
is used if dirsfile is unset.
Note that login shells do the equivalent of
dirs -L
on startup and, if savedirs is set,
dirs -S
before exiting. Because only ~/.tcshrc is normally sourced be-
fore ~/.cshdirs, dirsfile should be set in ~/.tcshrc rather than
~/.login.
The third form clears the directory stack.
echo [-n] word ...
Writes each word to the shell's standard output, separated by
spaces and terminated with a newline. The echo_style shell
variable may be set to emulate (or not) the flags and escape se-
quences of the BSD and/or System V versions of echo(1); see
“Escape sequences (+)” and echo(1).
echotc [-sv] arg ... (+)
Exercises the terminal capabilities (see termcap(5)) in arg.
For example,
echotc home
sends the cursor to the home position,
echotc cm 3 10
sends it to column 3 and row 10, and
echotc ts 0; echo "This is a test."; echotc fs
prints
This is a test.
in the status line.
If arg is ‘baud’, ‘cols’, ‘lines’, ‘meta’, or ‘tabs’, prints the
value of that capability (“yes” or “no” indicating that the ter-
minal does or does not have that capability). One might use
this to make the output from a shell script less verbose on slow
terminals, or limit command output to the number of lines on the
screen:
> set history=`echotc lines`
> @ history--
Termcap strings may contain wildcards which will not echo cor-
rectly. One should use double quotes when setting a shell vari-
able to a terminal capability string, as in the following exam-
ple that places the date in the status line:
> set tosl="`echotc ts 0`"
> set frsl="`echotc fs`"
> echo -n "$tosl";date; echo -n "$frsl"
With -s, nonexistent capabilities return the empty string rather
than causing an error. With -v, messages are verbose.
else
end
endif
endsw See the description of the foreach, if, switch, and while state-
ments below.
eval arg ...
Treats the arguments as input to the shell and executes the re-
sulting command(s) in the context of the current shell. This is
usually used to execute commands generated as the result of com-
mand or variable substitution, because parsing occurs before
these substitutions. See tset(1) for a sample use of eval.
exec command ...
Executes the specified command in place of the current shell.
exit [expr]
The shell exits either with the value of the specified expr (an
expression, as described under “Expressions”) or, without expr,
with the value 0.
fg [%job ...]
Brings the specified jobs (or, without arguments, the current
job) into the foreground, continuing each if it is stopped. job
may be a number, a string, ‘’, ‘%’, ‘+’, or ‘-’ as described un-
der “Jobs”. See also the run-fg-editor editor command.
filetest -op file ... (+)
Applies op (which is a file inquiry operator as described under
“File inquiry operators”) to each file and returns the results
as a space-separated list.
foreach name (wordlist)
...
end Successively sets the variable name to each member of wordlist
and executes the sequence of commands between this command and
the matching end. (Both foreach and end must appear alone on
separate lines.) The builtin command continue may be used to
continue the loop prematurely and the builtin command break to
terminate it prematurely. When this command is read from the
terminal, the loop is read once prompting with
foreach?
(or prompt2) before any statements in the loop are executed. If
you make a mistake typing in a loop at the terminal you can rub
it out.
getspath (+)
Prints the system execution path. (TCF only)
getxvers (+)
Prints the experimental version prefix. (TCF only)
glob word ...
Like echo, but the -n parameter is not recognized and words are
delimited by null characters in the output. Useful for programs
which wish to use the shell to filename expand a list of words.
goto word
word is filename and command-substituted to yield a string of
the form ‘label’. The shell rewinds its input as much as possi-
ble, searches for a line of the form
label:
possibly preceded by blanks or tabs, and continues execution af-
ter that line.
hashstat
Prints a statistics line indicating how effective the internal
hash table has been at locating commands (and avoiding exec's).
An exec is attempted for each component of the path where the
hash function indicates a possible hit, and in each component
which does not begin with a ‘/’.
On machines without vfork(2), prints only the number and size of
hash buckets.
history [-hTr] [n]
history -S|-L|-M [filename] (+)
history -c (+)
The first form prints the history event list. If n is given
only the n most recent events are printed or saved. With -h,
the history list is printed without leading numbers. If -T is
specified, timestamps are printed also in comment form. This
can be used to produce files suitable for loading with
history -L
or
source -h
With -r, the order of printing is most recent first rather than
oldest first.
The second form with -S saves the history list to filename. If
the first word of the savehist shell variable is set to a num-
ber, at most that many lines are saved. If the second word of
savehist is set to ‘merge’, the history list is merged with the
existing history file instead of replacing it (if there is one)
and sorted by time stamp. (+) Merging is intended for an envi-
ronment like the X Window System with several shells in simulta-
neous use. If the second word of savehist is ‘merge’ and the
third word is set to ‘lock’, the history file update will be se-
rialized with other shell sessions that would possibly like to
merge history at exactly the same time.
The second form with -L appends filename (which is presumably a
history list saved by the -S option or the savehist mechanism)
to the history list. -M is like -L, but the contents of
filename are merged into the history list and sorted by time-
stamp. In either case, histfile is used if filename is not
given and ~/.history is used if histfile is unset.
Note that
history -L
is exactly like
source -h
except that it does not require a filename.
Note that login shells do the equivalent of
history -L
on startup and, if savehist is set,
history -S
before exiting. Because only ~/.tcshrc is normally sourced be-
fore ~/.history, histfile should be set in ~/.tcshrc rather than
~/.login.
If histlit is set, the first and second forms print and save the
literal (unexpanded) form of the history list.
The third form clears the history list.
hup [command] (+)
With command, runs command such that it will exit on a hangup
signal and arranges for the shell to send it a hangup signal
when the shell exits. Note that commands may set their own re-
sponse to hangups, overriding hup. Without an argument, causes
the non-interactive shell only to exit on a hangup for the re-
mainder of the script. See also “Signal handling” and the nohup
builtin command.
if (expr) command
If expr (an expression, as described under “Expressions”) evalu-
ates true, then command is executed. Variable substitution on
command happens early, at the same time it does for the rest of
the if command. command must be a simple command, not an alias,
a pipeline, a command list or a parenthesized command list, but
it may have arguments. Input/output redirection occurs even if
expr is false and command is thus not executed; this is a bug.
if (expr) then
...
else if (expr2) then
...
else
...
endif If the specified expr is true then the commands to the first
else are executed; otherwise if expr2 is true then the commands
to the second else are executed, etc. Any number of else if
pairs are possible; only one endif is needed. The else part is
likewise optional. (The words else and endif must appear at the
beginning of input lines; the if must appear alone on its input
line or after an else.)
inlib shared-library ... (+)
Adds each shared-library to the current environment. There is
no way to remove a shared library. (Domain/OS only)
jobs [-l]
jobs -Z [title] (+)
The first form lists the active jobs. With -l, lists process
IDs in addition to the normal information. On TCF systems,
prints the site on which each job is executing.
The second form with the -Z option sets the process title to
title using setproctitle(3) where available. If no title is
provided, the process title will be cleared.
kill -l
kill [-s signal] %job|pid ...
The first form lists the signal names.
The second form sends the specified signal (or, if none is
given, the TERM (terminate) signal) to the specified jobs or
processes. job may be a number, a string, ‘’, ‘%’, ‘+’, or ‘-’
as described under “Jobs”. Signals are either given by number
or by name (as given in /usr/include/signal.h, stripped of the
prefix ‘SIG’).
There is no default job; entering just
kill
does not send a signal to the current job. If the signal being
sent is TERM (terminate) or HUP (hangup), then the job or
process is sent a CONT (continue) signal as well.
limit [-h] [resource [maximum-use]]
Limits the consumption by the current process and each process
it creates to not individually exceed maximum-use on the speci-
fied resource.
If no maximum-use is given, then the current limit for resource
is printed.
If no resource is given, then all limitations are given.
If the -h flag is given, the hard limits are used instead of the
current limits. The hard limits impose a ceiling on the values
of the current limits. Only the super-user may raise the hard
limits, but a user may lower or raise the current limits within
the legal range.
Controllable resource types currently include (if supported by
the OS):
resource Resource description
concurrency Maximum number of threads for this process.
coredumpsize Size of the largest core dump that will be
created.
cputime Maximum number of cpu-seconds to be used by
each process.
datasize Maximum growth of the data+stack region via
sbrk(2) beyond the end of the program text.
descriptors or openfiles
Maximum number of open files for this
process.
filesize Largest single file which can be created.
heapsize Maximum amount of memory a process may allo-
cate per brk(2) system call.
kqueues Maximum number of kqueues allocated for this
process.
maxlocks Maximum number of locks for this user.
maxmessage Maximum number of bytes in POSIX mqueues for
this user.
maxnice Maximum nice priority the user is allowed to
raise mapped from [19...-20] to [0...39] for
this user.
maxproc Maximum number of simultaneous processes for
this user id.
maxrtprio Maximum realtime priority for this user.
maxrttime Timeout for RT tasks in microseconds for
this user.
maxsignal Maximum number of pending signals for this
user.
maxthread Maximum number of simultaneous threads
(lightweight processes) for this user id.
memorylocked Maximum size which a process may lock into
memory using mlock(2).
memoryuse Maximum amount of physical memory a process
may have allocated to it at a given time.
posixlocks Maximum number of POSIX advisory locks for
this user.
pseudoterminals
Maximum number of pseudo-terminals for this
user.
sbsize Maximum size of socket buffer usage for this
user.
stacksize Maximum size of the automatically-extended
stack region.
swapsize Maximum amount of swap space reserved or
used for this user.
threads Maximum number of threads for this process.
vmemoryuse Maximum amount of virtual memory a process
may have allocated to it at a given time
(address space).
maximum-use may be given as a (floating point or integer) number
followed by a scale factor. For all limits other than cputime
the default scale is ‘k’ or ‘kilobytes’ (1024 bytes); a scale
factor of ‘m’ or ‘megabytes’ (1048576 bytes) or ‘g’ or
‘gigabytes’ (1073741824 bytes) may also be used. For cputime
the default scaling is ‘seconds’, while ‘m’ for minutes or ‘h’
for hours, or a time of the form ‘mm:ss’ giving minutes and sec-
onds may be used.
If maximum-use is ‘unlimited’, then the limitation on the speci-
fied resource is removed (this is equivalent to the unlimit
builtin command).
For both resource names and scale factors, unambiguous prefixes
of the names suffice.
log (+)
Prints the watch shell variable and reports on each user indi-
cated in watch who is logged in, regardless of when they last
logged in. See also watchlog.
login Terminates a login shell, replacing it with an instance of
/bin/login. This is one way to log off, included for compati-
bility with sh(1).
logout Terminates a login shell. Especially useful if ignoreeof is
set.
ls-F [-switch ...] [file ...] (+)
Lists files like
ls -F
but much faster.
ls-F identifies each type of special file in the listing with a
special character suffix:
Suffix Special file type
/ Directory.
* Executable.
# Block device.
% Character device.
| Named pipe (systems with named pipes only).
= Socket (systems with sockets only).
@ Symbolic link (systems with symbolic links only).
+ Hidden directory (AIX only) or context dependent
(HP/UX only).
: Network special (HP/UX only).
If the listlinks shell variable is set, symbolic links are iden-
tified in more detail (on only systems that have them, of
course):
Suffix Symbolic link type
@ Symbolic link to a non-directory.
> Symbolic link to a directory.
& Orphaned (broken) symbolic link.
listlinks also slows down ls-F and causes partitions holding
files pointed to by symbolic links to be mounted.
If the listflags shell variable is set to ‘x’, ‘a’, or ‘A’, or
any combination thereof (e.g., ‘xA’), they are used as flags to
ls-F, making it act like
ls -xF
ls -Fa
ls -FA
or a combination, for example
ls -FxA
On machines where
ls -C
is not the default, ls-F acts like
ls -CF
unless listflags contains an ‘x’, in which case it acts like
ls -xF
ls-F passes its arguments to ls(1) if it is given any switches,
so
alias ls ls-F
generally does the right thing.
The ls-F builtin can list files using different colors depending
on the file type or extension. See the color shell variable and
the CLICOLOR_FORCE, LSCOLORS, and LS_COLORS environment vari-
ables.
migrate [-site] pid|%jobid ... (+)
migrate -site (+)
The first form migrates the process or job to the site specified
or the default site determined by the system path. (TCF only)
The second form is equivalent to
migrate -site $$
in that it migrates the current process to the specified site.
Migrating the shell itself can cause unexpected behavior, be-
cause the shell does not like to lose its tty. (TCF only)
newgrp [-] [group] (+)
Equivalent to
exec newgrp
as per newgrp(1). Available only if the shell was so compiled;
see the version shell variable.
nice [+number] [command]
Increments the scheduling priority for the shell by number, or,
without number, by 4. With command, runs command at the appro-
priate priority. The greater the number, the less cpu the
process gets. The super-user may decrement the priority by us-
ing
nice -number ...
command is always executed in a sub-shell, and the restrictions
placed on commands in simple if statements apply.
nohup [command]
With command, runs command such that it will ignore hangup sig-
nals. Note that commands may set their own response to hangups,
overriding nohup.
Without an argument, causes the non-interactive shell only to
ignore hangups for the remainder of the script. See also
“Signal handling” and the hup builtin command.
notify [%job ...]
Causes the shell to notify the user asynchronously when the sta-
tus of any of the specified jobs (or, without %job, the current
job) changes, instead of waiting until the next prompt as is
usual. job may be a number, a string, ‘’, ‘%’, ‘+’, or ‘-’ as
described under “Jobs”. See also the notify shell variable.
onintr [-|label]
Controls the action of the shell on interrupts. Without argu-
ments, restores the default action of the shell on interrupts,
which is to terminate shell scripts or to return to the terminal
command input level.
With ‘-’, causes all interrupts to be ignored.
With label, causes the shell to execute a
goto label
when an interrupt is received or a child process terminates be-
cause it was interrupted.
onintr is ignored if the shell is running detached and in system
startup files (see “FILES”), where interrupts are disabled any-
way.
popd [-p] [-l] [-n|-v] [+n]
Without arguments, pops the directory stack and returns to the
new top directory.
With a number ‘+n’, discards the nth entry in the stack.
Finally, all forms of popd print the final directory stack, just
like dirs. The pushdsilent shell variable can be set to prevent
this and the -p flag can be given to override pushdsilent. The
-l, -n, and -v flags have the same effect on popd as on dirs.
(+)
printenv [name] (+)
Prints the names and values of all environment variables or,
with name, the value of the environment variable name.
pushd [-p] [-l] [-n|-v] [name|+n]
Without arguments, exchanges the top two elements of the direc-
tory stack. If pushdtohome is set, pushd without arguments acts
as
pushd ~
like cd. (+)
With name, pushes the current working directory onto the direc-
tory stack and changes to name. If name is ‘-’ it is inter-
preted as the previous working directory (see “Filename
substitution”). (+) If dunique is set, pushd removes any in-
stances of name from the stack before pushing it onto the stack.
(+)
With a number ‘+n’, rotates the nth element of the directory
stack around to be the top element and changes to it. If
dextract is set, however,
pushd +n
extracts the nth directory, pushes it onto the top of the stack
and changes to it. (+)
Finally, all forms of pushd print the final directory stack,
just like dirs. The pushdsilent shell variable can be set to
prevent this and the -p flag can be given to override
pushdsilent. The -l, -n, and -v flags have the same effect on
pushd as on dirs. (+)
rehash Causes the internal hash table of the contents of the directo-
ries in the path variable to be recomputed. This is needed if
the autorehash shell variable is not set and new commands are
added to directories in path while you are logged in. With
autorehash, a new command will be found automatically, except in
the special case where another command of the same name which is
located in a different directory already exists in the hash ta-
ble. Also flushes the cache of home directories built by tilde
expansion.
repeat count command
The specified command, which is subject to the same restrictions
as the command in the one line if statement above, is executed
count times. I/O redirections occur exactly once, even if count
is 0.
rootnode //nodename (+)
Changes the rootnode to //nodename, so that ‘/’ will be inter-
preted as ‘//nodename’. (Domain/OS only)
sched (+)
sched [+]hh:mm command (+)
sched -n (+)
The first form prints the scheduled-event list. The sched shell
variable may be set to define the format in which the scheduled-
event list is printed.
The second form adds command to the scheduled-event list. For
example,
> sched 11:00 echo It\'s eleven o\'clock.
causes the shell to echo
It's eleven o'clock.
at 11 AM.
The time may be in 12-hour AM/PM format
> sched 5pm set prompt='[%h] It\'s after 5; go home: >'
or may be relative to the current time:
> sched +2:15 /usr/lib/uucp/uucico -r1 -sother
A relative time specification may not use AM/PM format.
The third form removes item n from the event list:
> sched
1 Wed Apr 4 15:42 /usr/lib/uucp/uucico -r1 -sother
2 Wed Apr 4 17:00 set prompt=[%h] It's after 5; go home: >
> sched -2
> sched
1 Wed Apr 4 15:42 /usr/lib/uucp/uucico -r1 -sother
A command in the scheduled-event list is executed just before
the first prompt is printed after the time when the command is
scheduled. It is possible to miss the exact time when the com-
mand is to be run, but an overdue command will execute at the
next prompt. A command which comes due while the shell is wait-
ing for user input is executed immediately. However, normal op-
eration of an already-running command will not be interrupted so
that a scheduled-event list element may be run.
This mechanism is similar to, but not the same as, the at(1)
command on some Unix systems. Its major disadvantage is that it
may not run a command at exactly the specified time. Its major
advantage is that because sched runs directly from the shell, it
has access to shell variables and other structures. This pro-
vides a mechanism for changing one's working environment based
on the time of day.
set
set name ...
set name=word ...
set [-r] [-f|-l] name=(wordlist) ... (+)
set name[index]=word ...
set -r (+)
set -r name ... (+)
set -r name=word ... (+)
The first form of the command prints the value of all shell
variables. Variables which contain more than a single word
print as a parenthesized word list.
The second form sets name to the null string.
The third form sets name to the single word.
The fourth form sets name to the list of words in wordlist.
In all cases the value is command and filename expanded. If -r
is specified, the value is set read-only. If -f or -l are spec-
ified, set only unique words keeping their order. -f prefers
the first occurrence of a word, and -l the last.
The fifth form sets the index'th component of name to word; this
component must already exist.
The sixth form lists only the names of all shell variables that
are read-only.
The seventh form makes name read-only, whether or not it has a
value.
The eighth form is the same as the third form, but make name
read-only at the same time.
These arguments can be repeated to set and/or make read-only
multiple variables in a single set command. Note, however, that
variable expansion happens for all arguments before any setting
occurs. Note also that ‘=’ can be adjacent to both name and
word or separated from both by whitespace, but cannot be adja-
cent to only one or the other. See also the unset builtin com-
mand.
setenv [name [value]]
Without arguments, prints the names and values of all environ-
ment variables.
With name, sets the environment variable name to value or, with-
out value, to the null string.
setpath path (+)
Equivalent to setpath(1). (Mach only)
setspath LOCAL|site|cpu ... (+)
Sets the system execution path. (TCF only)
settc cap value (+)
Tells the shell to believe that the terminal capability cap (as
defined in termcap(5)) has the value value. No sanity checking
is done. Concept terminal users may have to
settc xn no
to get proper wrapping at the rightmost column.
setty [-d|-q|-x] [-a] [[+|-]mode] (+)
Controls which tty modes (see “Terminal management (+)”) the
shell does not allow to change. -d, -q, or -x tells setty to
act on the ‘edit’, ‘quote’, or ‘execute’ set of tty modes re-
spectively; without -d, -q, or -x, ‘execute’ is used.
Without other arguments, setty lists the modes in the chosen set
which are fixed on (‘+mode’) or off (‘-mode’). The available
modes, and thus the display, vary from system to system. With
-a, lists all tty modes in the chosen set whether or not they
are fixed. With +mode, -mode, or mode, fixes mode on or off or
removes control from mode in the chosen set. For example,
setty +echok echoe
fixes ‘echok’ mode on and allows commands to turn ‘echoe’ mode
on or off, both when the shell is executing commands.
setxvers [string] (+)
Set the experimental version prefix to string, or removes it if
string is omitted. (TCF only)
shift [variable]
Without arguments, discards argv[1] and shifts the members of
argv to the left. It is an error for argv not to be set or to
have fewer than one word as value.
With variable, performs the same function on variable.
source [-h] name [args ...]
The shell reads and executes commands from name. The commands
are not placed on the history list. If any args are given, they
are placed in argv. (+) source commands may be nested; if they
are nested too deeply the shell may run out of file descriptors.
An error in a source at any level terminates all nested source
commands.
With -h, commands are placed on the history list instead of be-
ing executed, much like
history -L
stop %job|pid ...
Stops the specified jobs or processes which are executing in the
background. job may be a number, a string, ‘’, ‘%’, ‘+’, or ‘-’
as described under “Jobs”.
There is no default job; entering just
stop
does not stop the current job.
suspend
Causes the shell to stop in its tracks, much as if it had been
sent a stop signal with ^Z. This is most often used to stop
shells started by su(1).
switch (string)
case str1:
...
breaksw
...
default:
...
breaksw
endsw Each case label is successively matched, against the specified
string which is first command and filename expanded. The file
metacharacters ‘*’, ‘?’, and ‘[...]’ may be used in the case la-
bels, which are variable expanded. If none of the labels match
before a default label is found, then the execution begins after
the default label. Each case label and the default label must
appear at the beginning of a line. The command breaksw causes
execution to continue after the endsw. Otherwise control may
fall through case labels and default labels as in C. If no la-
bel matches and there is no default, execution continues after
the endsw.
telltc (+)
Lists the values of all terminal capabilities (see termcap(5)).
termname [termtype] (+)
Tests if termtype (or the current value of TERM if no termtype
is given) has an entry in the hosts termcap(5) or terminfo(5)
database. Prints the terminal type to stdout and returns 0 if
an entry is present otherwise returns 1.
time [command]
Executes command (which must be a simple command, not an alias,
a pipeline, a command list or a parenthesized command list) and
prints a time summary as described under the time variable. If
necessary, an extra shell is created to print the time statistic
when the command completes.
Without command, prints a time summary for the current shell and
its children.
umask [value]
Sets the file creation mask to value, which is given in octal.
Common values for the mask are 002, giving all access to the
group and read and execute access to others, and 022, giving
read and execute access to the group and others.
Without value, prints the current file creation mask.
unalias pattern
Removes all aliases whose names match pattern. Thus
unalias *
removes all aliases. It is not an error for nothing to be
unaliased.
uncomplete pattern (+)
Removes all completions whose names match pattern. Thus
uncomplete *
removes all completions. It is not an error for nothing to be
uncompleted.
unhash Disables use of the internal hash table to speed location of ex-
ecuted programs.
universe universe (+)
Sets the universe to universe. (Masscomp/RTU only)
unlimit [-hf] [resource]
Removes the limitation on resource or, if no resource is speci-
fied, all resource limitations.
With -h, the corresponding hard limits are removed. Only the
super-user may do this.
Note that unlimit may not exit successful, since most systems do
not allow descriptors to be unlimited.
With -f errors are ignored.
unset pattern
Removes all variables whose names match pattern, unless they are
read-only. Thus
unset *
removes all variables unless they are read-only; this is a bad
idea.
It is not an error for nothing to be unset.
unsetenv pattern
Removes all environment variables whose names match pattern.
Thus
unsetenv *
removes all environment variables; this is a bad idea.
It is not an error for nothing to be unsetenved.
ver [systype [command]] (+)
Without arguments, prints SYSTYPE.
With systype, sets SYSTYPE to systype.
With systype and command, executes command under systype.
systype may be ‘bsd4.3’ or ‘sys5.3’.
(Domain/OS only)
wait The shell waits for all background jobs. If the shell is inter-
active, an interrupt will disrupt the wait and cause the shell
to print the names and job numbers of all outstanding jobs.
warp universe (+)
Sets the universe to universe. (Convex/OS only)
watchlog (+)
An alternate name for the log builtin command. Available only
if the shell was so compiled; see the version shell variable.
where command (+)
Reports all known instances of command, including aliases,
builtins and executables in path.
which command (+)
Displays the command that will be executed by the shell after
substitutions, path searching, etc. The builtin command is just
like which(1), but it correctly reports tcsh aliases and
builtins and is 10 to 100 times faster. See also the
which-command editor command.
while (expr)
...
end Executes the commands between the while and the matching end
while expr (an expression, as described under “Expressions”)
evaluates non-zero. while and end must appear alone on their
input lines. break and continue may be used to terminate or
continue the loop prematurely. If the input is a terminal, the
user is prompted the first time through the loop as with
foreach.
Special aliases (+)
If set, each of these aliases executes automatically at the indicated
time. They are all initially undefined.
Supported special aliases are:
beepcmd
Runs when the shell wants to ring the terminal bell.
cwdcmd Runs after every change of working directory. For example, if
the user is working on an X window system using xterm(1) and a
re-parenting window manager that supports title bars such as
twm(1) and does
> alias cwdcmd 'echo -n "^[]2;${HOST}:$cwd ^G"'
then the shell will change the title of the running xterm(1) to
be the name of the host, a ‘:’, and the full current working di-
rectory. A fancier way to do that is
> alias cwdcmd 'echo -n "^[]2;${HOST}:$cwd^G^[]1;${HOST}^G"'
This will put the hostname and working directory on the title
bar but only the hostname in the icon manager menu.
Note that putting a cd, pushd, or popd in cwdcmd may cause an
infinite loop. It is the author's opinion that anyone doing so
will get what they deserve.
jobcmd Runs before each command gets executed, or when the command
changes state. This is similar to postcmd, but it does not
print builtins.
> alias jobcmd 'echo -n "^[]2\;\!#:q^G"'
then executing
vi foo.c
will put the command string in the xterm title bar.
helpcommand
Invoked by the run-help editor command. The command name for
which help is sought is passed as sole argument. For example,
if one does
> alias helpcommand '\!:1 --help'
then the help display of the command itself will be invoked, us-
ing the GNU help calling convention.
Currently there is no easy way to account for various calling
conventions (e.g., the customary Unix ‘-h’), except by using a
table of many commands.
periodic
Runs every tperiod minutes. This provides a convenient means
for checking on common but infrequent changes such as new mail.
For example, if one does
> set tperiod = 30
> alias periodic checknews
then the checknews(1) program runs every 30 minutes.
If periodic is set but tperiod is unset or set to 0, periodic
behaves like precmd.
precmd Runs just before each prompt is printed. For example, if one
does
> alias precmd date
then date(1) runs just before the shell prompts for each com-
mand.
There are no limits on what precmd can be set to do, but discre-
tion should be used.
postcmd
Runs before each command gets executed.
> alias postcmd 'echo -n "^[]2\;\!#:q^G"'
then executing
vi foo.c
will put the command string in the xterm title bar.
shell Specifies the interpreter for executable scripts which do not
themselves specify an interpreter. The first word should be a
full path name to the desired interpreter (e.g., ‘/bin/csh’ or
‘/usr/local/bin/tcsh’).
Special shell variables
The variables described in this section have special meaning to the
shell.
The shell sets addsuffix, argv, autologout, csubstnonl, command,
echo_style, edit, gid, group, home, loginsh, oid, path, prompt, prompt2,
prompt3, shell, shlvl, tcsh, term, tty, uid, user, and version at
startup; they do not change thereafter unless changed by the user. The
shell updates cwd, dirstack, owd, and status when necessary, and sets
logout on logout.
The shell synchronizes group, home, path, shlvl, term, and user with the
environment variables of the same names: whenever the environment vari-
able changes the shell changes the corresponding shell variable to match
(unless the shell variable is read-only) and vice versa. Note that al-
though cwd and PWD have identical meanings, they are not synchronized in
this manner, and that the shell automatically converts between the dif-
ferent formats of path and PATH.
Supported special shell variables are:
addsuffix (+)
If set, filename completion adds ‘/’ to the end of directories
and a space to the end of normal files when they are matched ex-
actly. Set by default.
afsuser (+)
If set, autologout's autolock feature uses its value instead of
the local username for kerberos authentication.
ampm (+)
If set, all times are shown in 12-hour AM/PM format.
anyerror (+)
This variable selects what is propagated to the value of the
status variable. For more information see the description of
the status variable below.
argv The arguments to the shell. Positional parameters are taken
from argv, i.e., ‘$1’ is replaced by ‘$argv[1]’, etc. Set by
default, but usually empty in interactive shells.
autocorrect (+)
If set, the spell-word editor command is invoked automatically
before each completion attempt.
autoexpand (+)
If set, the expand-history editor command is invoked automati-
cally before each completion attempt.
If this is set to ‘onlyhistory’, then only history will be ex-
panded and a second completion will expand filenames.
autolist (+)
If set, possibilities are listed after an ambiguous completion.
If set to ‘ambiguous’, possibilities are listed only when no new
characters are added by completion.
autologout (+)
The first word is the number of minutes of inactivity before au-
tomatic logout. The optional second word is the number of min-
utes of inactivity before automatic locking. When the shell au-
tomatically logs out, it prints
auto-logout
sets the variable logout to ‘automatic’ and exits. When the
shell automatically locks, the user is required to enter their
password to continue working. Five incorrect attempts result in
automatic logout.
Set to ‘60’ (automatic logout after 60 minutes, and no locking)
by default in login and superuser shells, but not if the shell
thinks it is running under a window system (i.e., the DISPLAY
environment variable is set), the tty is a pseudo-tty (pty) or
the shell was not so compiled (see the version shell variable).
Unset autologout or set it to ‘0’ to disable automatic logout.
See also the afsuser and logout shell variables.
autorehash (+)
If set, the internal hash table of the contents of the directo-
ries in the path variable will be recomputed if a command is not
found in the hash table. In addition, the list of available
commands will be rebuilt for each command completion or spelling
correction attempt if set to ‘complete’ or ‘correct’ respec-
tively; if set to ‘always’, this will be done for both cases.
backslash_quote (+)
If set, backslashes (`\') always quote ‘\’, ‘'’, and ‘"’. This
may make complex quoting tasks easier, but it can cause syntax
errors in csh(1) scripts.
catalog
The file name of the message catalog. If set, tcsh uses
tcsh.${catalog} as a message catalog instead of default tcsh.
cdpath A list of directories in which cd should search for subdirecto-
ries if they aren't found in the current directory.
cdtohome (+)
If not set, cd requires a directory name, and will not go to the
home directory if it's omitted. This is set by default.
color If set, it enables color display for the builtin ls-F and it
passes --color=auto to ls(1) (or --color=always if
CLICOLOR_FORCE is set). Alternatively, it can be set to only
‘ls-F’ or only ‘ls’ to enable color for a specific command.
Setting it to nothing is equivalent to setting it to ‘(ls-F
ls)’. Color is disabled if the output is not directed to a ter-
minal, unless CLICOLOR_FORCE is set.
colorcat
If set, it enables color escape sequence for NLS message files,
and display colorful NLS messages.
command (+)
If set, the command which was passed to the shell with the -c
flag.
compat_expr (+)
If set, the shell will evaluate expressions right to left, like
the original csh(1).
complete (+)
If set to ‘igncase’, the completion becomes case insensitive.
If set to ‘enhance’, completion ignores case and considers hy-
phens and underscores to be equivalent; it will also treat peri-
ods, hyphens and underscores (‘.’, ‘-’, and ‘_’) as word separa-
tors.
If set to ‘Enhance’, completion matches uppercase and underscore
characters explicitly and matches lowercase and hyphens in a
case-insensitive manner; it will treat periods, hyphens and un-
derscores as word separators.
continue (+)
If set to a list of commands, the shell will continue the listed
commands, instead of starting a new one.
continue_args (+)
Same as continue, but the shell will execute:
echo `pwd` $argv > ~/.<cmd>_pause; %<cmd>
correct (+)
If set to ‘cmd’, commands are automatically spelling-corrected.
If set to ‘complete’, commands are automatically completed.
If set to ‘all’, the entire command line is corrected.
csubstnonl (+)
If set, newlines and carriage returns in command substitution
are replaced by spaces. Set by default.
cwd The full pathname of the current directory. See also the
dirstack and owd shell variables.
dextract (+)
If set,
pushd +n
extracts the nth directory from the directory stack rather than
rotating it to the top.
dirsfile (+)
The default location in which
dirs -S
and
dirs -L
look for a history file. If unset, ~/.cshdirs is used. Because
only ~/.tcshrc is normally sourced before ~/.cshdirs, dirsfile
should be set in ~/.tcshrc rather than ~/.login.
dirstack (+)
An array of all the directories on the directory stack.
‘$dirstack[1]’ is the current working directory, ‘$dirstack[2]’
the first directory on the stack, etc. Note that the current
working directory is ‘$dirstack[1]’ but ‘=0’ in directory stack
substitutions, etc. One can change the stack arbitrarily by
setting dirstack, but the first element (the current working di-
rectory) is always correct. See also the cwd and owd shell
variables.
dspmbyte (+)
Has an effect only if ‘dspm’ is listed as part of the version
shell variable.
If set to ‘euc’, it enables display and editing EUC-kanji(Japan-
ese) code.
If set to ‘sjis’, it enables display and editing Shift-
JIS(Japanese) code.
If set to ‘big5’, it enables display and editing Big5(Chinese)
code.
If set to ‘utf8’, it enables display and editing Utf8(Unicode)
code.
If set to exactly 256 characters in the following format, it en-
ables display and editing of original multi-byte code format:
> set dspmbyte = NNN...[250 characters]...NNN
Each character N in the 256 character value corresponds (from
left to right) to the ASCII codes 0x00, 0x01, 0x02, ..., 0xfd,
0xfe, 0xff at the same index. Each character is set to number
0, 1, 2 or 3, with the meaning:
Number Multi-byte purpose
0 Not used for multi-byte characters.
1 Used for the first byte of a multi-byte character.
2 Used for the second byte of a multi-byte charac-
ter.
3 Used for both the first byte and second byte of a
multi-byte character.
For example, if set to 256 characters starting with ‘001322’,
the value is interpreted as:
Character ASCII Multi-byte character use
0 0x00 Not used.
0 0x01 Not used.
1 0x02 First byte.
3 0x03 First byte and second byte.
2 0x04 Second byte.
2 0x05 Second byte.
The GNU coreutils version of ls(1) cannot display multi-byte
filenames without the -N (--literal) option. If you are using
this version, set the second word of dspmbyte to ‘ls’. If not,
for example,
ls-F -l
cannot display multi-byte filenames.
Note that this variable can only be used if KANJI and DSPMBYTE
has been defined at compile time.
dunique (+)
If set, pushd removes any instances of name from the stack be-
fore pushing it onto the stack.
echo If set, each command with its arguments is echoed just before it
is executed. For non-builtin commands all expansions occur be-
fore echoing. Builtin commands are echoed before command and
filename substitution, because these substitutions are then done
selectively. Set by the -x command line option.
echo_style (+)
The style of the echo builtin. May be set to:
Value echo style
bsd Don't echo a newline if the first argument is -n;
the default for csh(1).
sysv Recognize backslashed escape sequences in echo
strings.
both Recognize both the -n flag and backslashed escape
sequences; the default for tcsh.
none Recognize neither.
Set by default to the local system default. The BSD and System
V options are described in the echo(1) man pages on the appro-
priate systems.
edit (+)
If set, the command-line editor is used. Set by default in in-
teractive shells.
editors (+)
A list of command names for the run-fg-editor editor command to
match. If not set, the EDITOR (‘ed’ if unset) and VISUAL (‘vi’
if unset) environment variables will be used instead.
ellipsis (+)
If set, the ‘%c’, ‘%.’, and ‘%C’ prompt sequences (see the
prompt shell variable) indicate skipped directories with an el-
lipsis (‘...’) instead of ‘/<skipped>’.
euid (+)
The user's effective user ID.
euser (+)
The first matching passwd entry name corresponding to the effec-
tive user ID.
fignore (+)
Lists file name suffixes to be ignored by completion.
filec In tcsh, completion is always used and this variable is ignored
by default.
If edit is unset, then the traditional csh(1) completion is
used.
If set in csh(1), filename completion is used.
gid (+)
The user's real group ID.
globdot (+)
If set, wild-card glob patterns will match files and directories
beginning with ‘.’ except for ‘.’ and ‘..’.
globstar (+)
If set, the ‘**’ and ‘***’ file glob patterns will match any
string of characters including ‘/’ traversing any existing sub-
directories. For example,
ls **.c
will list all the .c files in the current directory tree.
If used by itself, it will match zero or more sub-directories.
For example,
ls /usr/include/**/time.h
will list any file named ‘time.h’ in the /usr/include directory
tree; whereas
ls /usr/include/**time.h
will match any file in the /usr/include directory tree ending in
‘time.h’.
To prevent problems with recursion, the ‘**’ glob-pattern will
not descend into a symbolic link containing a directory. To
override this, use ‘***’.
group (+)
The user's group name.
highlight
If set, the incremental search match (in i-search-back and
i-search-fwd) and the region between the mark and the cursor are
highlighted in reverse video.
Highlighting requires more frequent terminal writes, which in-
troduces extra overhead. If you care about terminal perfor-
mance, you may want to leave this unset.
histchars
A string value determining the characters used in “History
substitution”.
The first character of its value is used as the history substi-
tution character, replacing the default character ‘!’.
The second character of its value replaces the character ‘^’ in
quick substitutions.
histdup (+)
Controls handling of duplicate entries in the history list.
If set to ‘all’ only unique history events are entered in the
history list.
If set to ‘prev’ and the last history event is the same as the
current command, then the current command is not entered in the
history.
If set to ‘erase’ and the same event is found in the history
list, that old event gets erased and the current one gets in-
serted.
Note that the ‘prev’ and ‘all’ options renumber history events
so there are no gaps.
histfile (+)
The default location in which
history -S
and
history -L
look for a history file.
If unset, ~/.history is used.
histfile is useful when sharing the same home directory between
different machines, or when saving separate histories on differ-
ent terminals. Because only ~/.tcshrc is normally sourced be-
fore ~/.history, histfile should be set in ~/.tcshrc rather than
~/.login.
histlit (+)
If set, builtin and editor commands and the savehist mechanism
use the literal (unexpanded) form of lines in the history list.
See also the toggle-literal-history editor command.
history
The first word indicates the number of history events to save.
The optional second word (+) indicates the format in which his-
tory is printed; if not given, ‘%h\t%T\t%R\n’ is used. The for-
mat sequences are described below under prompt; note the vari-
able meaning of ‘%R’.
Set to ‘100’ by default.
home Initialized to the home directory of the invoker. The filename
expansion of ‘~’ refers to this variable.
ignoreeof
If set to the empty string or ‘0’ and the input device is a ter-
minal, the end-of-file command (usually generated by the user by
typing ^D on an empty line) causes the shell to print
Use "exit" to leave tcsh.
instead of exiting. This prevents the shell from accidentally
being killed. Historically this setting exited after 26 succes-
sive EOF's to avoid infinite loops.
If set to a number ‘n’, the shell ignores n - 1 consecutive
end-of-files and exits on the nth (+).
If unset, ‘1’ is used, i.e., the shell exits on a single ^D.
implicitcd (+)
If set, the shell treats a directory name typed as a command as
though it were a request to change to that directory.
If set to verbose, the change of directory is echoed to the
standard output.
This behavior is inhibited in non-interactive shell scripts, or
for command strings with more than one word. Changing directory
takes precedence over executing a like-named command, but it is
done after alias substitutions. Tilde and variable expansions
work as expected.
inputmode (+)
If set to ‘insert’ or ‘overwrite’, puts the editor into that in-
put mode at the beginning of each line.
killdup (+)
Controls handling of duplicate entries in the kill ring.
If set to ‘all’ only unique strings are entered in the kill
ring.
If set to ‘prev’ and the last killed string is the same as the
current killed string, then the current string is not entered in
the ring.
If set to ‘erase’ and the same string is found in the kill ring,
the old string is erased and the current one is inserted.
killring (+)
Indicates the number of killed strings to keep in memory.
Set to ‘30’ by default.
If unset or set to less than ‘2’, the shell will only keep the
most recently killed string.
Strings are put in the killring by the editor commands that
delete (kill) strings of text, e.g. backward-delete-word,
kill-line, etc, as well as the copy-region-as-kill command. The
yank editor command will yank the most recently killed string
into the command-line, while yank-pop (see “Editor commands
(+)”) can be used to yank earlier killed strings.
listflags (+)
If set to ‘x’, ‘a’, or ‘A’, or any combination thereof (e.g.,
‘xA’), they are used as flags to ls-F, making it act like
ls -xF
ls -Fa
ls -FA
or a combination, for example
ls -FxA
If the first word contains ‘a’, shows all files (even if they
start with a ‘.’).
If the first word contains ‘A’, shows all files but ‘.’ and
‘..’.
If the first word contains ‘x’, sorts across instead of down.
If the second word of listflags is set, it is used as the path
to ls(1).
listjobs (+)
If set, all jobs are listed when a job is suspended.
If set to ‘long’, the listing is in long format.
listlinks (+)
If set, the ls-F builtin command shows the type of file to which
each symbolic link points.
listmax (+)
The maximum number of items which the list-choices editor com-
mand will list without asking first.
listmaxrows (+)
The maximum number of rows of items which the list-choices edi-
tor command will list without asking first.
loginsh (+)
Set by the shell if it is a login shell. Setting or unsetting
it within a shell has no effect. See also shlvl.
logout (+)
Set by the shell to ‘normal’ before a normal logout, ‘automatic’
before an automatic logout, and ‘hangup’ if the shell was killed
by a hangup signal (see “Signal handling”). See also the
autologout shell variable.
mail A list of files and directories to check for incoming mail, op-
tionally preceded by a numeric word. Before each prompt, if 10
minutes have passed since the last check, the shell checks each
file and displays
You have new mail.
(or, if mail contains multiple files,
You have new mail in name.)
if the filesize is greater than zero in size and has a modifica-
tion time greater than its access time.
If you are in a login shell, then no mail file is reported un-
less it has been modified after the time the shell has started
up, to prevent redundant notifications. Most login programs
will tell you whether or not you have mail when you log in.
If a file specified in mail is a directory, the shell will count
each file within that directory as a separate message, and will
report
You have n mails.
or
You have n mails in name.
as appropriate. This functionality is provided primarily for
those systems which store mail in this manner, such as the An-
drew Mail System.
If the first word of mail is numeric it is taken as a different
mail checking interval, in seconds.
Under very rare circumstances, the shell may report
You have mail.
instead of
You have new mail.
matchbeep (+)
If set to ‘never’, completion never beeps.
If set to ‘nomatch’, it beeps only when there is no match.
If set to ‘ambiguous’, it beeps when there are multiple matches.
If set to ‘notunique’, it beeps when there is one exact and
other longer matches.
If unset, ‘ambiguous’ is used.
nobeep (+)
If set, beeping is completely disabled. See also visiblebell.
noclobber
If set, restrictions are placed on output redirection to insure
that files are not accidentally destroyed and that ‘>>’ redirec-
tions refer to existing files, as described in the
“Input/output” section.
If contains ‘ask’, an interacive confirmation is presented,
rather than an error.
If contains ‘notempty’, ‘>’ is allowed on empty files.
noding If set, disable the printing of
DING!
in the prompt time specifiers at the change of hour.
noglob If set, “Filename substitution” and “Directory stack
substitution (+)” are inhibited. This is most useful in shell
scripts which do not deal with filenames, or after a list of
filenames has been obtained and further expansions are not de-
sirable.
nokanji (+)
If set and the shell supports Kanji (see the version shell vari-
able), it is disabled so that the meta key can be used.
nonomatch
If set, a “Filename substitution” or “Directory stack
substitution (+)” which does not match any existing files is
left untouched rather than causing an error. It is still an er-
ror for the substitution to be malformed. For example,
echo [
still gives an error.
nostat (+)
A list of directories (or glob-patterns which match directories;
see “Filename substitution”) that should not be stat(2)ed during
a completion operation. This is usually used to exclude direc-
tories which take too much time to stat(2), for example /afs.
notify If set, the shell announces job completions asynchronously. The
default is to present job completions just before printing a
prompt.
oid (+)
The user's real organization ID. (Domain/OS only)
owd (+)
The old working directory, equivalent to the ‘-’ used by cd and
pushd. See also the cwd and dirstack shell variables.
padhour
If set, enable the printing of padding '0' for hours, in 24 and
12 hour formats. E.g., ‘07:45:42’ versus ‘7:45:42’.
parseoctal
To retain compatibily with older versions numeric variables
starting with 0 are not interpreted as octal. Setting this
variable enables proper octal parsing.
path A list of directories in which to look for executable commands.
A null word specifies the current directory.
If there is no path variable then only full path names will exe-
cute.
path is set by the shell at startup from the PATH environment
variable or, if PATH does not exist, to a system-dependent de-
fault, such as
(/usr/local/bin /usr/bsd /bin /usr/bin .)
The shell may put ‘.’ first or last in path or omit it entirely
depending on how it was compiled; see the version shell vari-
able.
A shell which is given neither the -c nor the -t option hashes
the contents of the directories in path after reading ~/.tcshrc
and each time path is reset.
If one adds a new command to a directory in path while the shell
is active, one may need to do a rehash for the shell to find it.
printexitvalue (+)
If set and an interactive program exits with a non-zero status,
the shell prints
Exit status
prompt The string which is printed before reading each command from the
terminal.
prompt may include any of the following formatting sequences
(+), which are replaced by the given information:
Format Prompt information
%/ The current working directory.
%~ The current working directory, but with one's home
directory represented by ‘~’ and other users' home
directories represented by ‘~user’ as per
“Filename substitution”. ‘~user’ substitution
happens only if the shell has already used ‘~user’
in a pathname in the current session.
%c[[0]n], %.[[0]n]
The trailing component of the current working di-
rectory, or n trailing components if a digit n is
given. If n begins with ‘0’, the number of
skipped components precede the trailing compo-
nent(s) in the format ‘/<skipped>trailing’. If
the ellipsis shell variable is set, skipped compo-
nents are represented by an ellipsis so the whole
becomes ‘...trailing’. ‘~’ substitution is done
as in ‘%~’ above, but the ‘~’ component is ignored
when counting trailing components.
%C Like ‘%c’, but without ‘~’ substitution.
%h, %!, !
The current history event number.
%M The full hostname.
%m The hostname up to the first ‘.’.
%S (%s)
Start (stop) standout mode.
%B (%b)
Start (stop) boldfacing mode.
%U (%u)
Start (stop) underline mode.
%t, %@ The time of day in 12-hour AM/PM format.
%T Like ‘%t’, but in 24-hour format (but see the ampm
shell variable).
%p The ‘precise’ time of day in 12-hour AM/PM format,
with seconds.
%P Like ‘%p’, but in 24-hour format (but see the ampm
shell variable).
\c c is parsed as in bindkey.
^c c is parsed as in bindkey.
%% A single ‘%’.
%n The user name.
%N The effective user name.
%j The number of jobs.
%d The weekday in ‘Day’ format.
%D The day in ‘dd’ format.
%w The month in ‘Mon’ format.
%W The month in ‘mm’ format.
%y The year in ‘yy’ format.
%Y The year in ‘yyyy’ format.
%l The shell's tty.
%L Clears from the end of the prompt to end of the
display or the end of the line.
%$ Expands the shell or environment variable name im-
mediately after the ‘$’.
%# ‘>’ (or the first character of the promptchars
shell variable) for normal users, ‘#’ (or the sec-
ond character of promptchars) for the superuser.
%{string%}
Includes string as a literal escape sequence. It
should be used only to change terminal attributes
and should not move the cursor location. This
cannot be the last sequence in prompt.
%? The return code of the command executed just be-
fore the prompt.
%R In prompt2, the status of the parser. In prompt3,
the corrected string. In history, the history
string.
‘%B’, ‘%S’, ‘%U’, and ‘%{string%}’ are available in only eight-
bit-clean shells; see the version shell variable.
The bold, standout and underline sequences are often used to
distinguish a superuser shell. For example,
> set prompt = "%m [%h] %B[%@]%b [%/] you rang? "
tut [37] [2:54pm] [/usr/accts/sys] you rang? _
If ‘%t’, ‘%@’, ‘%T’, ‘%p’, or ‘%P’ is used, and noding is not
set, then print
DING!
on the change of hour (i.e, ‘:00’ minutes) instead of the actual
time.
Set by default to ‘%# ’ in interactive shells.
prompt2 (+)
The string with which to prompt in while and foreach loops and
after lines ending in ‘\’. The same format sequences may be
used as in prompt; note the variable meaning of ‘%R’.
Set by default to ‘%R? ’ in interactive shells.
prompt3 (+)
The string with which to prompt when confirming automatic
spelling correction. The same format sequences may be used as
in prompt; note the variable meaning of ‘%R’.
Set by default to ‘CORRECT>%R (y|n|e|a)? ’ in interactive
shells.
promptchars (+)
If set (to a two-character string), the ‘%#’ formatting sequence
in the prompt shell variable is replaced with the first charac-
ter for normal users and the second character for the superuser.
pushdtohome (+)
If set, pushd without arguments does
pushd ~
like cd.
pushdsilent (+)
If set, pushd and popd do not print the directory stack.
recexact (+)
If set, completion completes on an exact match even if a longer
match is possible.
recognize_only_executables (+)
If set, command listing displays only files in the path that are
executable. Slow.
rmstar (+)
If set, the user is prompted before
rm *
is executed.
rprompt (+)
The string to print on the right-hand side of the screen (after
the command input) when the prompt is being displayed on the
left. It recognizes the same formatting characters as prompt.
It will automatically disappear and reappear as necessary, to
ensure that command input isn't obscured, and will appear only
if the prompt, command input, and itself will fit together on
the first line.
If edit isn't set, then rprompt will be printed after the prompt
and before the command input.
savedirs (+)
If set, the shell does
dirs -S
before exiting.
If the first word is set to a number, at most that many direc-
tory stack entries are saved.
savehist
If set, the shell does
history -S
before exiting.
If the first word is set to a number, at most that many lines
are saved. (The number should be less than or equal to the num-
ber history entries; if it is set to greater than the number of
history settings, only history entries will be saved.)
If the second word is set to ‘merge’, the history list is merged
with the existing history file instead of replacing it (if there
is one) and sorted by time stamp and the most recent events are
retained.
If the second word is set to ‘merge’ and the third word is set
to ‘lock’, the history file update will be serialized with other
shell sessions that would possibly like to merge history at ex-
actly the same time. (+)
sched (+)
The format in which the sched builtin command prints scheduled
events; if not given, ‘%h\t%T\t%R\n’ is used. The format se-
quences are described above under prompt; note the variable
meaning of ‘%R’.
shell The file in which the shell resides. This is used in forking
shells to interpret files which have execute bits set, but which
are not executable by the system. (See the description of
“Builtin and non-builtin command execution”.) Initialized to
the (system-dependent) home of the shell.
shlvl (+)
The number of nested shells. Reset to 1 in login shells. See
also loginsh.
status The exit status from the last command or backquote expansion, or
any command in a pipeline is propagated to status. (This is
also the default csh(1) behavior.) This default does not match
what POSIX mandates (to return the status of the last command
only). To match the POSIX behavior, you need to unset anyerror.
If the anyerror variable is unset, the exit status of a pipeline
is determined only from the last command in the pipeline, and
the exit status of a backquote expansion is not propagated to
status.
If a command terminated abnormally, then 0200 is added to the
status. Builtin commands which fail return exit status ‘1’, all
other builtin commands return status ‘0’.
symlinks (+)
Can be set to several different values to control symbolic link
(‘symlink’) resolution:
If set to ‘chase’, whenever the current directory changes to a
directory containing a symbolic link, it is expanded to the real
name of the directory to which the link points. This does not
work for the user's home directory; this is a bug.
If set to ‘ignore’, the shell tries to construct a current di-
rectory relative to the current directory before the link was
crossed. This means that
cd
through a symbolic link and then
cd ..
returns one to the original directory. This affects only
builtin commands and filename completion.
If set to ‘expand’, the shell tries to fix symbolic links by ac-
tually expanding arguments which look like path names. This af-
fects any command, not just builtins. Unfortunately, this does
not work for hard-to-recognize filenames, such as those embedded
in command options. Expansion may be prevented by quoting.
While this setting is usually the most convenient, it is some-
times misleading and sometimes confusing when it fails to recog-
nize an argument which should be expanded. A compromise is to
use ‘ignore’ and use the editor command normalize-path (bound by
default to ^X-n) when necessary.
Some examples are in order. First, let's set up some play di-
rectories:
> cd /tmp
> mkdir from from/src to
> ln -s from/src to/dst
Here's the behavior with symlinks unset,
> cd /tmp/to/dst; echo $cwd
/tmp/to/dst
> cd ..; echo $cwd
/tmp/from
Here's the behavior with symlinks set to ‘chase’,
> cd /tmp/to/dst; echo $cwd
/tmp/from/src
> cd ..; echo $cwd
/tmp/from
Here's the behavior with symlinks set to ‘ignore’,
> cd /tmp/to/dst; echo $cwd
/tmp/to/dst
> cd ..; echo $cwd
/tmp/to
Here's the behavior with symlinks set to ‘expand’.
> cd /tmp/to/dst; echo $cwd
/tmp/to/dst
> cd ..; echo $cwd
/tmp/to
> cd /tmp/to/dst; echo $cwd
/tmp/to/dst
> cd ".."; echo $cwd
/tmp/from
> /bin/echo ..
/tmp/to
> /bin/echo ".."
..
Note that ‘expand’ expansion:
1. Works just like ‘ignore’ for builtins like cd.
2. Is prevented by quoting.
3. Happens before filenames are passed to non-builtin
commands.
tcsh (+)
The version number of the shell in the format ‘R.VV.PP’, where
‘R’ is the major release number, ‘VV’ the current version, and
‘PP’ the patchlevel.
term The terminal type. Usually set in ~/.login as described under
“Startup and shutdown”.
time If set to a number, then the time builtin executes automatically
after each command which takes more than that many CPU seconds.
If there is a second word, it is used as a format string for the
output of the time builtin.
(u) The following sequences may be used in the time format
string:
Format Time information
%U The time the process spent in user mode in cpu
seconds.
%S The time the process spent in kernel mode in cpu
seconds.
%E The elapsed (wall clock) time in seconds.
%P The CPU percentage computed as (%U + %S) / %E.
%W Number of times the process was swapped.
%X The average amount in (shared) text space used in
Kbytes.
%D The average amount in (unshared) data/stack space
used in Kbytes.
%K The total space used (%X + %D) in Kbytes.
%M The maximum memory the process had in use at any
time in Kbytes.
%F The number of major page faults (page needed to be
brought from disk).
%R The number of minor page faults.
%I The number of input operations.
%O The number of output operations.
%r The number of socket messages received.
%s The number of socket messages sent.
%k The number of signals received.
%w The number of voluntary context switches (waits).
%c The number of involuntary context switches.
Only the first four sequences are supported on systems without
BSD resource limit functions. The default time format is ‘%Uu
%Ss %E %P %X+%Dk %I+%Oio %Fpf+%Ww’ for systems that support re-
source usage reporting and ‘%Uu %Ss %E %P’ for systems that do
not.
Under Sequent's DYNIX/ptx, ‘%X’, ‘%D’, ‘%K’, ‘%r’, and ‘%s’ are
not available, but the following additional sequences are:
Format Description Sequent DYNIX/ptx time information
%Y The number of system calls performed.
%Z The number of pages which are zero-filled on de-
mand.
%i The number of times a process's resident set size
was increased by the kernel.
%d The number of times a process's resident set size
was decreased by the kernel.
%l The number of read system calls performed.
%m The number of write system calls performed.
%p The number of reads from raw disk devices.
%q The number of writes to raw disk devices.
and the default time format is ‘%Uu %Ss %E %P %I+%Oio %Fpf+%Ww’.
Note that the CPU percentage can be higher than 100% on multi-
processors.
tperiod (+)
The period, in minutes, between executions of the periodic spe-
cial alias.
tty (+)
The name of the tty, or empty if not attached to one.
uid (+)
The user's real user ID.
user The user's login name.
verbose
If set, causes the words of each command to be printed, after
history substitution (if any). Set by the -v command line op-
tion.
version (+)
The version ID stamp. It contains the shell's version number
(see tcsh), origin, release date, vendor, operating system and
machine (see VENDOR, OSTYPE, and MACHTYPE) and a comma-separated
list of options which were set at compile time. Options which
are set by default in the distribution are noted.
Supported version options include:
Option Description
8b The shell is eight bit clean; default.
7b The shell is not eight bit clean.
wide The shell is multi-byte encoding clean (like
UTF-8).
nls The system's NLS is used; default for systems with
NLS.
lf Login shells execute /etc/csh.login before instead
of after /etc/csh.cshrc and ~/.login before in-
stead of after ~/.tcshrc and ~/.history.
dl ‘.’ is put last in path for security; default.
nd ‘.’ is omitted from path for security.
vi vi(1)-style editing is the default rather than
emacs(1)-style.
dtr Login shells drop DTR when exiting.
bye bye is a synonym for logout and log is an alter-
nate name for watchlog.
al autologout is enabled; default.
kan Kanji is used if appropriate according to locale
settings, unless the nokanji shell variable is
set.
sm The system's malloc(3) is used.
hb The
#!interpreter arg ...
convention is emulated when executing shell
scripts.
ng The newgrp builtin is available.
rh The shell attempts to set the REMOTEHOST environ-
ment variable.
afs The shell verifies your password with the kerberos
server if local authentication fails. The afsuser
shell variable or the AFSUSER environment variable
override your local username if set.
An administrator may enter additional strings to indicate dif-
ferences in the local version.
vimode (+)
If unset, various key bindings change behavior to be more
emacs(1)-style: word boundaries are determined by wordchars ver-
sus other characters.
If set, various key bindings change behavior to be more
vi(1)-style: word boundaries are determined by wordchars versus
whitespace versus other characters; cursor behavior depends upon
current vi mode (command, delete, insert, replace).
This variable is unset by bindkey -e and set by bindkey -v.
vimode may be explicitly set or unset by the user after those
bindkey operations if required.
visiblebell (+)
If set, a screen flash is used rather than the audible bell.
See also nobeep.
watch (+)
A list of user/terminal pairs to watch for logins and logouts.
If either the user is ‘any’ all terminals are watched for the
given user and vice versa. Setting watch to
(any any)
watches all users and terminals. For example,
set watch = (george ttyd1 any console $user any)
reports activity of the user ‘george’ on ‘ttyd1’, any user on
the console, and oneself (or a trespasser) on any terminal.
Logins and logouts are checked every 10 minutes by default, but
the first word of watch can be set to a number to check every so
many minutes. For example,
set watch = (1 any any)
reports any login/logout once every minute. For the impatient,
the log builtin command triggers a watch report at any time.
All current logins are reported (as with the log builtin) when
watch is first set.
The who shell variable controls the format of watch reports.
who (+)
The format string for watch messages. The following sequences
are replaced by the given information:
Format Who information
%n The name of the user who logged in/out.
%a The observed action, i.e., ‘logged on’, ‘logged
off’, or ‘replaced olduser on’.
%l The terminal (tty) on which the user logged
in/out.
%M The full hostname of the remote host, or ‘local’
if the login/logout was from the local host.
%m The hostname of the remote host up to the first
‘.’. The full name is printed if it is an IP ad-
dress or an X Window System display.
‘%M’ and ‘%m’ are available on only systems that store the re-
mote hostname in /etc/utmp.
If unset,
%n has %a %l from %m.
is used, or
%n has %a %l.
on systems which don't store the remote hostname.
wordchars (+)
A list of non-alphanumeric characters to be considered part of a
word by the forward-word, backward-word, etc., editor commands.
If unset, the default value is determined based on the state of
vimode: if vimode is unset, ‘*?_-.[]~=’ is used as the default;
if vimode is set, ‘_’ is used as the default.
ENVIRONMENT
AFSUSER (+)
Equivalent to the afsuser shell variable.
CLICOLOR_FORCE
Color sequences for ls-F are normally disabled if the output is
not directed to a terminal. This can be overridden by setting
this variable, which also changes the ls-F invocation of ls(1)
to use --color=always instead of --color=auto.
Note that color must be set for this environment variable to be
effective; by itself CLICOLOR_FORCE does not enable color ls-F.
COMMAND_LINE
Set by tcsh to the current command line when invoking programs
for the complete list mode ‘`...`’. See complete in “Builtin
commands”.
COLUMNS
The number of columns in the terminal. See “Terminal management
(+)”.
DISPLAY
Used by X Window System (see X(1)). If set, the shell does not
set autologout.
EDITOR The pathname to a default editor. Used by the run-fg-editor ed-
itor command if the the editors shell variable is unset. See
also the VISUAL environment variable.
GROUP (+)
Equivalent to the group shell variable.
HOME Equivalent to the home shell variable.
HOST (+)
Initialized to the name of the machine on which the shell is
running, as determined by the gethostname(2) system call.
HOSTTYPE (+)
Initialized to the type of machine on which the shell is run-
ning, as determined at compile time. This variable is obsolete
and will be removed in a future version.
HPATH (+)
A ‘:’-separated list of directories in which the run-help editor
command looks for command documentation.
LANG Gives the preferred character environment. See “Native Language
System support (+)”.
LC_CTYPE
If set, only ctype character handling is changed. See “Native
Language System support (+)”.
LINES The number of lines in the terminal. See “Terminal management
(+)”.
LSCOLORS
One of two environment variables that may be used to define the
per-file colors used by ls-F (along with LS_COLORS). This vari-
able is used by some BSD versions of ls(1).
On tcsh startup, LS_COLORS takes priority over LSCOLORS. If
both LSCOLORS or LS_COLORS are setenv, the most recent setenv is
used. If LSCOLORS is unsetenv while LS_COLORS is still setenv,
then LS_COLORS is parsed again (with any warnings suppressed) to
reapply its settings.
This variable is a 22 character string containing a concatena-
tion of 11 pairs of the format fb, where f is the foreground
color and b is the background color. If fewer than 11 pairs are
provided, default colors are used for the remaining entries. If
more than 11 pairs are provided, the extra values are ignored.
The order of the color attribute pairs to the equivalent
LS_COLORS variable, the file type, and default color, is as fol-
lows:
Index Var File type. [Default color]
1 di Directory. [Bold blue]
2 ln Symbolic link. [Bold cyan]
3 so Socket. [Bold magenta]
4 pi Named pipe (FIFO). [Yellow (or brown)]
5 ex Executable file. [Bold green]
6 bd Block device. [Bold yellow]
7 cd Character device. [Bold yellow]
8 su Setuid file. [White on red]
9 sg Setgid file. [Black on yellow]
10 tw Sticky and other writable directory.
[Black on green]
11 ow Other writable but not sticky directory.
[Blue on green]
The color code designators are as follows:
Code Description
a Black.
b Red.
c Green.
d Yellow (or brown).
e Blue.
f Magenta.
g Cyan.
h Light grey.
A Bold black, usually shows up as dark grey.
B Bold red.
C Bold green.
D Bold yellow.
E Bold blue.
F Bold magenta.
G Bold cyan.
H Bold light grey; looks like bright white.
x Default foreground or background.
Note that the above are standard ANSI colors. The actual dis-
play may differ depending on the color capabilities of the ter-
minal in use.
The default colors are as per the color variables in LS_COLORS,
and are not the same default colors as those used by some BSD
versions of ls(1).
LS_COLORS
One of two environment variables that may be used to define the
per-file colors used by ls-F (along with LSCOLORS). This vari-
able is used by the GNU coreutils version of ls(1) and may be
setup by dircolors(1).
On tcsh startup, LS_COLORS takes priority over LSCOLORS. If
both LSCOLORS or LS_COLORS are setenv, the most recent setenv is
used. If LS_COLORS is unsetenv while LSCOLORS is still setenv,
then LSCOLORS is parsed again (with any warnings suppressed) to
reapply its settings.
The format of this variable is reminiscent of the termcap(5)
file format; a ‘:’-separated list of expressions of the form
"xx=value" or "*ext=value".
The first form "xx=value", where "xx" is a two-character vari-
able name, supports the following variables, their associated
default ISO 6429 color code or escape sequences, and file type:
Var Default File type. [Default color]
no 0 Normal (non-filename) text.
fi 0 Regular file.
di 01;34 Directory. [Bold blue]
ln 01;36 Symbolic link. [Bold cyan]
pi 33 Named pipe (FIFO). [Yellow (or brown)]
so 01;35 Socket. [Bold magenta]
do 01;35 Door. [Bold magenta]
bd 01;33 Block device. [Bold yellow]
cd 01;33 Character device. [Bold yellow]
ex 01;32 Executable file. [Bold green]
mi (none) Missing file (orphaned symbolic link
target). Defaults to fi.
or (none) Orphaned (broken) symbolic link.
Defaults to ln.
lc ^[[ Left code.
rc m Right code.
ec (none) End code. Replaces lc+no+rc.
su 37;41 Setuid file. [White on red]
sg 30;43 Setgid file. [Black on yellow]
tw 30;42 Sticky and other writable directory.
[Black on green]
ow 34;42 Other writable but not sticky directory.
[Blue on green]
st 37;44 Sticky but not other writable directory.
[White on blue]
mh (none) File with multiple hard links.
You need to include only the variables you want to change from
the default.
The second form "*ext=value" colorizes file names based on ex-
tension. For example, using ISO 6429 codes, to color all C-lan-
guage source files blue you would specify "*.c=34". This would
color all files ending in ‘.c’ in blue foreground (34) color.
Control characters can be written either in C-style-escaped no-
tation, or in stty-like ^-notation. The C-style notation adds
‘^[’ for Escape, ‘_’ for a normal space character, and ‘?’ for
Delete. In addition, the ‘^[’ escape character can be used to
override the default interpretation of ‘^[’, ‘^’, ‘:’, and ‘=’.
Each filename will be output to the terminal as
lc color-code rc filename ec
If the ‘ec’ code is undefined, the sequence
lc no rc
will be used instead. This is generally more convenient to use,
but less general.
The left code (‘lc’), right code (‘rc’), and end codes (‘ec’)
are provided so you don't have to type common parts over and
over again and to support weird terminals; you will generally
not need to change them at all unless your terminal does not use
ISO 6429 color codes but a different system.
If your terminal uses ISO 6429 color codes, you can compose the
type codes (i.e., all except the ‘lc’, ‘rc’, and ‘ec’ codes)
from numerical ISO 6429 color codes separated by ‘;’. For exam-
ple, ‘01;32’ is bright green foreground with default background.
The most common ISO 6429 color codes are:
Color Description
0 To restore default color.
1 Bold / brighter colors.
4 Underlined text.
5 Flashing text.
30 Black foreground.
31 Red foreground.
32 Green foreground.
33 Yellow (or brown) foreground.
34 Blue foreground.
35 Magenta foreground.
36 Cyan foreground.
37 White (or gray) foreground.
40 Black background.
41 Red background.
42 Green background.
43 Yellow (or brown) background.
44 Blue background.
45 Magenta background.
46 Cyan background.
47 White (or gray) background.
Not all ISO 6429 color codes will work on all systems or display
devices.
A few terminal programs do not recognize the default end code
properly. If all text gets colorized after you do a directory
listing, try changing the ‘no’ and ‘fi’ codes from 0 to the nu-
merical codes for your standard foreground and background col-
ors.
For symbolic links the ‘ln’ keyword can be set to ‘target’,
which makes the file color the same as the color of the link
target.
MACHTYPE (+)
The machine type (microprocessor class or machine model), as de-
termined at compile time.
NOREBIND (+)
If set, printable characters are not rebound to
self-insert-command. See “Native Language System support (+)”.
OSTYPE (+)
The operating system, as determined at compile time.
PATH A ‘:’-separated list of directories in which to look for exe-
cutables. Equivalent to the path shell variable, but in a dif-
ferent format.
PWD (+)
Equivalent to the cwd shell variable, but not synchronized to
it; updated only after an actual directory change.
REMOTEHOST (+)
The host from which the user has logged in remotely, if this is
the case and the shell is able to determine it. Set only if the
shell was so compiled; see the version shell variable.
SHLVL (+)
Equivalent to the shlvl shell variable.
SYSTYPE (+)
The current system type. (Domain/OS only)
TERM Equivalent to the term shell variable.
TERMCAP
The terminal capability string. See “Terminal management (+)”.
USER Equivalent to the user shell variable.
VENDOR (+)
The vendor, as determined at compile time.
VISUAL The pathname to a default full-screen editor. Used by the
run-fg-editor editor command if the the editors shell variable
is unset. See also the EDITOR environment variable.
FILES
/etc/csh.cshrc
Read first by every shell.
ConvexOS, Stellix and Intel use /etc/cshrc.
NeXTs use /etc/cshrc.std.
A/UX, AMIX, Cray and IRIX have no equivalent in csh(1), but read
this file in tcsh anyway.
Solaris 2.x does not have it either, but tcsh reads /etc/.cshrc.
(+)
/etc/csh.login
Read by login shells after /etc/csh.cshrc.
ConvexOS, Stellix and Intel use /etc/login.
NeXTs use /etc/login.std.
Solaris 2.x uses /etc/.login.
A/UX, AMIX, Cray and IRIX use /etc/cshrc.
~/.tcshrc (+)
Read by every shell after /etc/csh.cshrc or its equivalent.
~/.cshrc
Read by every shell, if ~/.tcshrc doesn't exist, after
/etc/csh.cshrc or its equivalent.
This manual uses ‘~/.tcshrc’ to mean “~/.tcshrc or, if ~/.tcshrc
is not found, ~/.cshrc”.
~/.history
Read by login shells after ~/.tcshrc if savehist is set, but see
also histfile.
~/.login
Read by login shells after ~/.tcshrc or ~/.history.
The shell may be compiled to read ~/.login before instead of af-
ter ~/.tcshrc and ~/.history; see the version shell variable.
~/.cshdirs (+)
Read by login shells after ~/.login if savedirs is set, but see
also dirsfile.
/etc/csh.logout
Read by login shells at logout.
ConvexOS, Stellix and Intel use /etc/logout. NeXTs use
/etc/logout.std.
A/UX, AMIX, Cray and IRIX have no equivalent in csh(1), but read
this file in tcsh anyway.
Solaris 2.x does not have it either, but tcsh reads
/etc/.logout. (+)
~/.logout
Read by login shells at logout after /etc/csh.logout or its
equivalent.
/bin/sh
Used to interpret shell scripts not starting with a ‘#’.
/tmp/sh*
Temporary file for ‘<<’.
/etc/passwd
Source of home directories for ‘~name’ substitutions.
The order in which startup files are read may differ if the shell was so
compiled; see “Startup and shutdown” and the version shell variable.
NEW FEATURES (+)
This manual describes tcsh as a single entity, but experienced csh(1)
users will want to pay special attention to tcsh's new features.
A command-line editor, which supports emacs(1)-style or vi(1)-style key
bindings. See “The command-line editor (+)” and “Editor commands (+)”.
Programmable, interactive word completion and listing. See “Completion
and listing (+)” and the complete and uncomplete builtin commands.
“Spelling correction (+)” of filenames, commands and variables.
“Editor commands (+)” which perform other useful functions in the middle
of typed commands, including documentation lookup (run-help), quick edi-
tor restarting (run-fg-editor), and command resolution (which-command).
An enhanced history mechanism. Events in the history list are time-
stamped. See also the history command and its associated shell vari-
ables, the previously undocumented ‘#’ event specifier and new modifiers
under “History substitution”, the down-history, expand-history,
history-search-backward, history-search-forward, i-search-back,
i-search-fwd, toggle-literal-history, vi-search-back, vi-search-fwd, and
up-history editor commands and the histlit shell variable.
Enhanced directory parsing and directory stack handling. See the cd,
pushd, popd, and dirs commands and their associated shell variables, the
description of “Directory stack substitution (+)”, the dirstack, owd,
and symlinks shell variables and the normalize-command and
normalize-path editor commands.
Negation in glob-patterns. See “Filename substitution”.
New “File inquiry operators” and a filetest builtin which uses them.
A variety of “Automatic, periodic and timed events (+)” including sched-
uled events, special aliases, automatic logout and terminal locking,
command timing and watching for logins and logouts.
Support for the Native Language System (see “Native Language System
support (+)”), OS variant features (see “OS variant support (+)” and the
echo_style shell variable) and system-dependent file locations (see
“FILES”).
Extensive terminal-management capabilities. See “Terminal management
(+)”.
New builtin commands including builtins, hup, ls-F, newgrp, printenv,
which, and where.
New variables that make useful information easily available to the
shell. See the gid, loginsh, oid, shlvl, tcsh, tty, uid, and version
shell variables and the HOST, REMOTEHOST, VENDOR, OSTYPE, and MACHTYPE
environment variables.
A new syntax for including useful information in the prompt string (see
prompt), and special prompts for loops and spelling correction (see
prompt2 and prompt3).
Read-only variables. See “Variable substitution”.
THE T IN TCSH
In 1964, DEC produced the PDP-6. The PDP-10 was a later re-implementa-
tion. It was re-christened the DECsystem-10 in 1970 or so when DEC
brought out the second model, the KI10.
TENEX was created at Bolt, Beranek & Newman (a Cambridge, Massachusetts
think tank) in 1972 as an experiment in demand-paged virtual memory op-
erating systems. They built a new pager for the DEC PDP-10 and created
the OS to go with it. It was extremely successful in academia.
In 1975, DEC brought out a new model of the PDP-10, the KL10; they in-
tended to have only a version of TENEX, which they had licensed from
BBN, for the new box. They called their version TOPS-20 (their capital-
ization is trademarked). A lot of TOPS-10 users (`The OPerating System
for PDP-10') objected; thus DEC found themselves supporting two incom-
patible systems on the same hardware--but then there were 6 on the
PDP-11!
TENEX, and TOPS-20 to version 3, had command completion via a user-code-
level subroutine library called ULTCMD. With version 3, DEC moved all
that capability and more into the monitor (`kernel' for you Unix types),
accessed by the COMND% JSYS (`Jump to SYStem' instruction, the supervi-
sor call mechanism [are my IBM roots also showing?]).
The creator of tcsh was impressed by this feature and several others of
TENEX and TOPS-20, and created a version of csh which mimicked them.
LIMITATIONS
The system limits argument lists to ARG_MAX characters.
The number of arguments to a command which involves filename expansion
is limited to 1/6th the number of characters allowed in an argument
list.
Command substitutions may substitute no more characters than are allowed
in an argument list.
To detect looping, the shell restricts the number of alias substitutions
on a single line to 20.
SEE ALSO
csh(1), dircolors(1), emacs(1), ls(1), newgrp(1), setpath(1), sh(1),
stty(1), su(1), tset(1), vi(1), x(1), access(2), execve(2), fork(2),
killpg(2), pipe(2), setrlimit(2), sigvec(2), stat(2), umask(2),
vfork(2), wait(2), malloc(3), setlocale(3), tty(4), a.out(5),
termcap(5), environ(7), termio(7), Introduction to the C Shell
VERSION
This manual documents tcsh 6.24.13 (Astron) 2024-06-12.
AUTHORS
William Joy.
Original author of csh(1).
J.E. Kulp, IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria.
Job control and directory stack features.
Ken Greer, HP Labs, 1981.
File name completion.
Mike Ellis, Fairchild, 1983.
Command name recognition/completion.
Paul Placeway, Ohio State CIS Dept., 1983-1993.
Command line editor, prompt routines, new glob syntax and numerous
fixes and speedups.
Karl Kleinpaste, CCI, 1983-4.
Special aliases, directory stack extraction stuff, login/logout
watch, scheduled events, and the idea of the new prompt format.
Rayan Zachariassen, University of Toronto, 1984.
ls-F and which builtins and numerous bug fixes, modifications and
speedups.
Chris Kingsley, Caltech.
Fast storage allocator routines.
Chris Grevstad, TRW, 1987.
Incorporated 4.3BSD csh(1) into tcsh.
Christos S. Zoulas, Cornell U. EE Dept., 1987-94.
Ports to HPUX, SVR2 and SVR3, a SysV version of getwd.c,
SHORT_STRINGS support and a new version of sh.glob.c.
James J Dempsey, BBN, and Paul Placeway, OSU, 1988.
A/UX port.
Daniel Long, NNSC, 1988.
wordchars.
Patrick Wolfe, Kuck and Associates, Inc., 1988.
vi mode cleanup.
David C Lawrence, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1989.
autolist and ambiguous completion listing.
Alec Wolman, DEC, 1989.
Newlines in the prompt.
Matt Landau, BBN, 1989.
~/.tcshrc.
Ray Moody, Purdue Physics, 1989.
Magic space bar history expansion.
Mordechai ????, Intel, 1989.
printprompt() fixes and additions.
Kazuhiro Honda, Dept. of Computer Science, Keio University, 1989.
Automatic spelling correction and prompt3.
Per Hedeland, Ellemtel, Sweden, 1990-.
Various bugfixes, improvements and manual updates.
Hans J. Albertsson, Sun Sweden.
ampm, settc, and telltc.
Michael Bloom.
Interrupt handling fixes.
Michael Fine, Digital Equipment Corp.
Extended key support.
Eric Schnoebelen, Convex, 1990.
Convex support, lots of csh(1) bug fixes, save and restore of direc-
tory stack.
Ron Flax, Apple, 1990.
A/UX 2.0 (re)port.
Dan Oscarsson, LTH Sweden, 1990.
NLS support and simulated NLS support for non NLS sites, fixes.
Johan Widen, SICS Sweden, 1990.
shlvl, Mach support, correct-line, 8-bit printing.
Matt Day, Sanyo Icon, 1990.
POSIX termio support, SysV limit fixes.
Jaap Vermeulen, Sequent, 1990-91.
Vi mode fixes, expand-line, window change fixes, Symmetry port.
Martin Boyer, Institut de recherche d'Hydro-Quebec, 1991.
autolist beeping options, modified the history search to search for
the whole string from the beginning of the line to the cursor.
Scott Krotz, Motorola, 1991.
Minix port.
David Dawes, Sydney U. Australia, Physics Dept., 1991.
SVR4 job control fixes.
Kimmo Suominen, 1991-.
Various portability and other fixes. Added ‘$''’ (dollar-single-
quotes).
Jose Sousa, Interactive Systems Corp., 1991.
Extended vi fixes and vi delete command.
Marc Horowitz, MIT, 1991.
ANSIfication fixes, new exec hashing code, imake fixes, where.
Luke Mewburn, 1991-.
Enhanced directory printing in prompt. Added ellipsis and rprompt.
vimode improvements. Manual page improvements.
Bruce Sterling Woodcock, sterling@netcom.com, 1991-1995.
ETA and Pyramid port, Makefile and lint fixes, ignoreeof=n addition,
and various other portability changes and bug fixes.
Jeff Fink, 1992.
complete-word-fwd and complete-word-back.
Harry C. Pulley, 1992.
Coherent port.
Andy Phillips, Mullard Space Science Lab U.K., 1992.
VMS-POSIX port.
Beto Appleton, IBM Corp., 1992.
Walking process group fixes, csh(1) bug fixes, POSIX file tests,
POSIX SIGHUP.
Scott Bolte, Cray Computer Corp., 1992.
CSOS port.
Kaveh R. Ghazi, Rutgers University, 1992.
Tek, m88k, Titan and Masscomp ports and fixes. Added autoconf sup-
port.
Mark Linderman, Cornell University, 1992.
OS/2 port.
Mika Liljeberg, liljeber@kruuna.Helsinki.FI, 1992.
Linux port.
Tim P. Starrin, NASA Langley Research Center Operations, 1993.
Read-only variables.
Dave Schweisguth, Yale University, 1993-4.
New man page and tcsh.man2html.
Larry Schwimmer, Stanford University, 1993.
AFS and HESIOD patches.
Edward Hutchins, Silicon Graphics Inc., 1996.
Added implicit cd.
Martin Kraemer, 1997.
Ported to Siemens Nixdorf EBCDIC machine.
Amol Deshpande, Microsoft, 1997.
Ported to WIN32 (Windows/95 and Windows/NT); wrote all the missing
library and message catalog code to interface to Windows.
Taga Nayuta, 1998.
Color ls additions.
THANKS TO
Bryan Dunlap, Clayton Elwell, Karl Kleinpaste, Bob Manson, Steve Romig,
Diana Smetters, Bob Sutterfield, Mark Verber, Elizabeth Zwicky and all
the other people at Ohio State for suggestions and encouragement
All the people on the net, for putting up with, reporting bugs in, and
suggesting new additions to each and every version
Richard M. Alderson III, for writing the “T in tcsh” section
BUGS
When a suspended command is restarted, the shell prints the directory it
started in if this is different from the current directory. This can be
misleading (i.e., wrong) as the job may have changed directories inter-
nally.
Shell builtin functions are not stoppable/restartable. Command se-
quences of the form
a ; b ; c
are also not handled gracefully when stopping is attempted. If you sus-
pend ‘b’, the shell will then immediately execute ‘c’. This is espe-
cially noticeable if this expansion results from an alias. It suffices
to place the sequence of commands in ‘()’'s to force it to a subshell,
i.e.,
( a ; b ; c )
Control over tty output after processes are started is primitive; per-
haps this will inspire someone to work on a good virtual terminal inter-
face. In a virtual terminal interface much more interesting things
could be done with output control.
Alias substitution is most often used to clumsily simulate shell proce-
dures; shell procedures should be provided rather than aliases.
Control structures should be parsed rather than being recognized as
built-in commands. This would allow control commands to be placed any-
where, to be combined with ‘|’, and to be used with ‘&’ and ‘;’ metasyn-
tax.
foreach doesn't ignore here documents when looking for its end.
It should be possible to use the ‘:’ modifiers on the output of command
substitutions.
The screen update for lines longer than the screen width is very poor if
the terminal cannot move the cursor up (i.e., terminal type ‘dumb’).
HPATH and NOREBIND don't need to be environment variables.
Glob-patterns which do not use ‘?’, ‘*’, or ‘[]’, or which use ‘{}’ or
‘~’ are not negated correctly.
The single-command form of if does output redirection even if the ex-
pression is false and the command is not executed.
ls-F includes file identification characters when sorting filenames and
does not handle control characters in filenames well. It cannot be in-
terrupted.
Command substitution supports multiple commands and conditions, but not
cycles or backward gotos.
Report bugs at https://bugs.astron.com/ preferably with fixes. If you
want to help maintain and test tcsh, add yourself to the mailing list in
https://mailman.astron.com/mailman/listinfo/tcsh
Astron 6.24.13 June 12, 2024 TCSH(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 03:59:33 CET 2025.