Freebsd – Turn DOCS, NLS, and EXAMPLES options off by default for all FreeBSD ports

You can use ports and packages simultaneously, both use the same package database in /var/db/pkg.

Actually, packages are generated by the ports system. For example, make package will install a port and generate the binary package for it. Also you can create a package from the currently installed port with the pkg_create -b command.

There is no need at all for you to use the default shell for a given system. Both Debian and FreeBSD provide a number of different shells, and most or all of them are available on both, either preinstalled or easily installable.

Watch out for naming. It's not uncommon for /bin/csh to really be tcsh, or for /bin/sh to be bash or ksh.

sh, the Bourne shell, is the oldest Unix shell that's still in common use. bash is probably the most widely used sh derivative; ksh and zsh are also widespread.

csh, the C shell, was developed for BSD by Bill Joy. It has some features that make for more convenient interactive use than sh (or at least than the old version of sh that existed at the time). tcsh is derived from csh, and adds a lot of new features, most of them aimed at interactive use. As you've seen by reading csh.whynot, csh and tcsh have some problems when it comes to using them for scripting as opposed to interactively.

Personally, I started with csh, then switched to tcsh when it became available. I now rarely use csh for scripting, preferring sh or bash (or Perl for anything reasonably complex).

(Update, a few years later: I've since abandoned tcsh, and I now use bash interactively.)

My advice would be to pick a single shell and learn it well, using it on both FreeBSD and Debian. If you choose tcsh, I think you'll have to install it on Debian: sudo apt-get install tcsh. If you choose bash, I don't know whether it's preinstalled on FreeBSD; if it isn't, it should be equally straightforward to install it.

It's not necessary to use the same shell interactively and for scripting, but it can avoid some confusion and make for a shorter learning curve.

ksh is probably about as powerful as bash, and zsh is even more powerful (and has a lot of features I've never taken the time to learn).

I suggest bash, for both FreeBSD and Debian (and for any other Unix-like systems you might use), and for both interactive use and scripting. But other choices are perfectly legitimate, and some might suit you better.