Here’s the Deal

eltclsh vs rc (shell)

2 2

9 0

When comparing eltclsh vs rc (shell), the Slant community recommends rc (shell) for most people. In the question“What are the best Bash replacements?” rc (shell) is ranked 5th while eltclsh is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose rc (shell) is:

rc is a very simple and easy to learn shell.

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best Bash replacements?

Pros

Pro
A more consistent alternative to the POSIX shell

Tcl is a saner scripting language built on the same principle as the Unix shell (everything is a string) with more than a hint of Lisp. eltclsh makes it possible to use Tcl interactively with tab completion for both language constructs and file paths. The result is that you can develop a snippet of Tcl code interactively and then paste it in your script.

Pro
TclVFS

TclVFS allows you access files inside ZIP archives or on remote HTTP and FTP servers like you would local files. If you put "package require vfs::urltype; vfs::urltype::Mount http"
in your ~/.eltclshrc you can do things like "file copy http://example.com/file /tmp/file" (HTTPS is currently not supported by TclVFS.)

Pro
Simple

rc is a very simple and easy to learn shell.

Pro
C-like syntax

rc has very C-like syntax, which is very helpful for people who are used to C-like programming languages and will find rc's syntax very enjoyable. For example:

for (i in `{seq 1 100}) { 
    echo $i 
}

Pro
Sane array handling

In rc $array expands to the whole array and if one of the elements of the array has spaces in it, it's still considered one single element after the array variable expansion.