UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Another option would be to switch to ksh93, a very advanced and fast shell, which fully supports floating point arithmetic.

In there a conversion program from tcsh to ksh. I used csh2sh of Olivier Aubert to covert tcsh to sh code.

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What do you think of zsh?

You can just run that code with ksh93. It is also a Bourne shell derivative and is fully POSIX compliant. zsh has many interesting features but has a different syntax..

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The important thing is on what platforms your scripts need to run, now and in the future. The safest best is to limit yourself to only the POSIX set of features. These scripts should run practically everywhere. Another route would be to use ksh93 and its more advanced features but it might not be available natively on every platform your script needs to run on, so that would mean you would need to install ksh93, which should not be a problem since it has become open source and there are packages for many platforms…

Notice that I did not do [ this && that ], but [ this ] && [ that ]

Instead of putting an && inside them, I made two logical statements joined with an && externally.

This is the same syntax you'd use to join external commands based on their return codes.

Code:

true && echo "The last command succeeded"
false || echo "The last command failed"

mangle_the_world || ( echo "Oh dear, mangling the world failed" ; putback_the_world )