Linux – Running tcsh scripts on startup in bash env

bashlinuxshell

I have a user called foo which is using tcsh by default in /etc/passwd. I cannot change that default shell. Foo has a service called xyz running, for which all the startup scripts and .(dot) file containing ENV variables are in home dir of foo.

Now a startup script is also created to run that service and placed in /etc/init.d/xyz which is written in bash.

Now the issue is that the service is not starting on boot and I cannot run it from my default user on login too. It is only possible to run when I su into foo user and execute the script to start the service.

If I do like this

sudo su foo /home/foo/xyz it will show me errors like then: then/endif not found..

So what I want to run a tcsh program to run on boot from a init.d script which is in bash. At present I tried to do this

su - foo -c "source /home/foo/.env_vars && /home/foo/bin/xyz start" but this is not starting the service at the time of boot.

I am not sure how to make a tcsh script execute on boot time.

Best Answer

You can either:

use tcsh -c $script to run the scripts with tcsh
set the shebang (first line) in the script to #!/bin/tcsh and set it executable; you can then just start it with $script as the command.

Related Solutions

Bash – Unique Features of bash compared to zsh

zsh is for vulcans. ;-)

Seriously: bash 4.0 has some features previously only found in zsh, like ** globbing:

% ls /usr/src/**/Makefile

is equivalent to:

% find /usr/src -name "Makefile"

but obviously more powerful.

In my experience bash's programmable completion performs a bit better than zsh's, at least for some cases (completing debian packages for aptitude for example).

bash has Alt + . to insert !$

zsh has expansion of all variables, so you can use e.g.



% rm !$<Tab>


for this. zsh can also expand a command in backtics, so

% cat `echo blubb | sed 's/u/a/'`<Tab>


yields

% cat blabb


I find it very useful to expand rm *, as you can see what would be removed and can maybe remove one or two files from the commmand to prevent them from being deleted.

Also nice: using the output from commands for other commands that do not read from stdin but expect a filename:

% diff <(sort foo) <(sort bar)


From what I read bash-completion also supports completing remote filenames over ssh if you use ssh-agent, which used to be a good reason to switch to zsh.

Aliases in zsh can be defined to work on the whole line instead of just at the beginning:

% alias -g ...="../.."
% cd ...

Bash Scripting – How to Determine if a Bash Variable is Empty

This will return true if a variable is unset or set to the empty string ("").

if [ -z "${VAR}" ];

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Unique Features of bash compared to zsh

Bash Scripting – How to Determine if a Bash Variable is Empty

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