Hi, How do I write a while loop in an interactive C shell? When I write out

while (1); echo "potato"; end

I am prompted on another line for the body of the loop.

Thanks!

The ";" is relevant to shell meaning "execute next command synchronously". You are not however, just in the the shell itself once you issue "while" you are in the loop so you have to use the syntax understood by while itself. You are not asking it to execute another command but rather to continue with the "while" command.

So on command line you'd have to type it as 3 lines:
If you're creating a script you can put this within the script.

well thats no good; you can do that sort of thing in bash, why not csh?

Because csh' man page specifically says "while" and "end" must appear on lines by themselves.

A better question is why would anyone want to use csh when bash, posix sh and ksh are in the world.

Haha, indeed. It's the default at my company and I haven't yet figured out how to make it bash or zsh when I login. Seems like a quick google search would answer me that, though.

If you're allowed to use "chsh" (i.e. "change shell"), that'll do it.

If you can't do a usermod or moduser to change the shell (which you can't if you don't have root access) you can always start it as a subshell just by typing the name of the new shell at the command line:
bash

If you don't want it to be a subshell you could just type:
exec bash

That way when you exit bash it will log you out because csh won't be there any more.

You could add the "exec bash" to your $HOME/.login file to make it do it automatically when you login with csh.

P.S. You can make your scripts run as bash by adding the interpreter line as the first line of the script:
#!/bin/bash

That way even if you have coworkers that run the scripts you create from their own csh logins the script itself will invoke bash before executing the commands that follow.