Last Updated: Wed Feb 27 17:06:15 EST 1991 This is for people that do not read the manual! So far people who don't read manuals don't read this either... I may call it README.*PLEASE* in the future, but then people won't be able to get it... :-) 1. Why is the meta key broken in tcsh-5.20? On some machines the tty is not set up to pass 8 bit characters by default. Tcsh 5.19 used to try to determine if pass8 should be set by looking at the terminal's meta key. Unfortunately there is no good way of determining if the terminal can really pass 8 characters or not. Consider if you are logged in through a modem line with 7 bits and parity and your terminal has a meta key. Then tcsh 5.19 would set wrongly set pass8. If you did like the prevous behavior you can add in /etc/Login, or in .login: if ( $?prompt ) then if ( "`echotc meta`" == "yes" ) then stty pass8 endif endif If you don't have pass8, maybe something like stty -parity -evenp -oddp cs8 -istrip (rs6000) or stty -parenb -istrip cs8 would work.. 2. I ran 'dbxtool &' and 'shelltool &' from tcsh, and they end up in cbreak and no echo mode? These programs are broken. Background jobs should not try to look at the tty. What happens is that dbxtool looks in stderr to inherit the tty setups, but tcsh sets up the tty in cbreak and -echo modes, so that it can do line editing. This cannot be fixed because tcsh cannot give away the tty. A work-around is: dbxtool < /dev/null >& /dev/null & 3. I tried to compile tcsh and it cannot find ? Your system does not support NLS. Undefine NLS in config_f.h and it should work fine. 4. Where can I get csh sources? Csh sources are not public domain. If you do not have an AT&T V3.2 source licence or better, you are stuck. 5. I just made tcsh my login shell, and I cannot ftp any more? Newer versions of the ftp daemon check for the validity of the user's shell before they allow logins. The list of valid login shells is either hardcoded or it is usually in a file called /etc/shells. If it is hard-coded, then you are out of luck and your best bet is to get a newer version of ftpd. Otherwise add tcsh to the list of shells. Remember that the full path is required. If there is no /etc/shells, and you are creating one, remember to add /bin/csh, /bin/sh, and any other valid shells for your system, so that other people can ftp too :-) 6. I am using SunView and editing is screwed up. In particular my arrow keys and backspace don't work right. What am I doing wrong? Well, cmdtool tries to do its own command line editing and the effect you get is one of using an editor inside an editor. Both try to interpret the arrow key sequences and cmdtool wins since it gets them first. The solutions are in my order of preference: 1 Don't use suntools 2 Use shelltool instead of cmdtool. 3 Unset edit in tcsh. 7. I rlogin to another machine, and then no matter what I tell 'stty' I cannot get it to pass 8 bit characters? Maybe you need to use 'rlogin -8' to tell rlogin to pass 8 bit characters. Everything else is a bug :-(