running cshrc script in RHEL 7 from bash account does not work

Question

I was given a software suite which is based around cshrc. Such that a user is supposed to source a setup.cshrc file and within that it sources numerous other .cshrc scripts to set up the environment to compile and run a bunch of old fortran written programs.

I am running RHEL 7.9 x86-64, and the author had told me to make a user account, or change my user account, to /usr/bin/csh in order to run everything properly. Is this really necessary?

All my attempts to run these csh setup files fail when doing from a bash shell. However if I do make a local user account in linux where in /etc/passwd it says /usr/bin/csh instead of /usr/bin/bash then all the csh scripts provided to me work when I run them. But I prefer that all my linux accounts (including mine) is bash. Is there a way to keep my account as bash but run these csh scripts?

Answer 1

• You will be able to run your setup file from either csh or tcsh, generally not from bash (it really depends on the content of the csh script).

• As a rule for (shell) scripts, if file setup.cshrc is properly equipped with a shebang #!/bin/csh or #!/bin/tcsh (or a variation of that) on its first line, then you need that interpreter to be present because the corresponding shell environment will be called for the content of the script to be properly executed.

If the output of chsh -l includes /bin/csh, or /bin/tcsh, just try:

$ /bin/csh setup.cshrc         # replace csh by tcsh if needed

If the output of chsh -l does NOT include /bin/csh, or /bin/tcsh, install tcsh on your system:

$ sudo yum install tcsh
$ cat /etc/shells       # < check that output includes /bin/tcsh 

Then you can either run from a shell as above:

$ tcsh setup.cshrc

or temporarily change your current account's default login shell to tcsh with:

$ chsh -s tcsh

and perform your setup from there.