Why no csh/tcsh, and what to do about it?

[Prentiss Riddle]

I'm a WestHost newbie, and more of a SunOS/MacOSX guy, so maybe this is a Linux newbie question, too.

(1) Why is there no csh or tcsh in my path?

(2) Assuming I'm not happy living without csh or tcsh, is the right thing to complain to support or just to grumble and install tcsh myself?

(3) If I try to do the install myself, is it true that I need to add "LIBES= -lncurses" in the tcsh Makefile? I found a tip to that effect:

http://forums.westhost.com/showthread.php?t=6963

...but when I try it I get an error:

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lncurses

(I have to say I'm a little annoyed to be struggling to get basic infrastructure in place that has been available in every Unix environment I've used since 1983!)

[rolling]

(1) You'll find quite a few commands missing in our environment. We operate in a pseudo environment and Westhost have removed various commands for their own reasons.

(2) Grumble if you like. I just get on and build it

(3) I had to build ncurses in order to install Python (http://www.rollingr.net/wordpress/2006/11/10/installing-python/). It was fairly painless.

NOTE: You will have problems trying to install some packages to /usr/local as we do not have root access. I install all packages that I have to build with --prefix=/usr/mylocal and have added this to my paths.

[Prentiss Riddle]

Thanks for the tip. Following your handy guide, I believe I was able to install ncurses. However, when I try to make tcsh I get the error:

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lncurses
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [gethost] Error 1

This is after setting the prefix in configure and making the symlinks from include/*.h to include/ncurses/*.h.

Maybe the answer is in your last line about adding the prefix directory to your paths. Is this something that has to happen elsewhere, like maybe in .bashrc? If so, can you spell it out for a bash newb? Thanks again!

[rolling]

try

ldconfig -v

and see what it reports.

I think that you may need to edit /etc/ld.so.conf to include /usr/mylocal/lib as first line and then enable this by typing ldconfig on its own