shell recommendations

paranoos · 2005-07-15 20:26:35

i'm a long time user of bash. i think i briefly touched korn shell on an aix server at university, but i always ran bash instead.

bash is nice to use for quickly automating tasks obviously ... but i'm wondering, i know a lot of people here use other shells, like tcsh or zsh (how about pdksh? it's in the repos too)

let's have a discussion about advantages and disadvantages of each. i'd like to try some different shells tomorrow.

bash has decent tab completion ... i'm using my own custom bashcompletion scripts (i cut out a lot of stuff from the official scripts to speed it up).

but, bash has awful syntax. i still don't really understand the difference between [ ] and [[ ]]. ... and while it doesn't bother me, it has a large memory footprint as well.

so? what's your take on your favourite shell? why should people use it?

cactus · 2005-07-15 20:48:00

I like bash. I feel like a newb in any other shell.

Dusty · 2005-07-15 20:50:41

I've always used bash. I rarely use it for more than short scripts, since python generally serves better. As a shell, bash with my custom input_rc is exactly what I need.

Dusty

Snowman · 2005-07-15 21:02:31

I am using tcsh at the university and until recently I was using it at home. Since I wanted to learn a scripting language, I chose bash and decided to switch to it. I have been able to recreate my tcsh environment in bash. The only (small) issue is that when I do an history search, it doesn't move the cursor at the end of the line.

Shofs · 2005-07-15 22:54:33

Right now, including my vote it is:
bash
   100% [ 7 ]
tcsh
   0% [ 0 ]
zsh
   0% [ 0 ]
korn or pdksh
   0% [ 0 ]
other, mention below
   0% [ 0 ]

I am not surprised. I have not run across any distro in my experience that used anything other than bash as the default shell, therefore I haven't even really tried anything else. I don't have any reason to either.

ozar · 2005-07-15 23:14:55

I generally stick with bash.

Stinky · 2005-07-15 23:47:12

I stick with bash at home. However, at work, I write all of my scripts in Korn. Simply because not all of my servers have Bash installed on them.

codergeek42 · 2005-07-16 00:09:24

GNU Bash at home and work (CygWin )

archdaemon · 2005-07-16 01:21:31

I've used zsh a bit and found it to be a bad tradeoff - a lot of *really* nice features but at the cost of too much complexity and incompatibility. I've also played with csh a bit when I've been in FreeBSD but not for scripting and I ended up making BSD use bash anyway, because it doesn't make sense to me to use one shell for interactive use and another to script. Other than quirky install stuff (Arch uses ash on install, IIRC) I haven't used others.

Bash is the de facto standard and it's good that it's a good shell. A bit of feeping creaturitus but not like zsh and not as frigging *unusable* interactively as sh (oh, yeah, I tried BSD's sh, too.) So, yeah, bash.

iphitus · 2005-07-16 01:39:35

I use zsh. And contrary to archdaemon, I havnt found it a tradeoff.

It's extra tab completion options and many other features absolutely rock.

iphitus

Meshuggin · 2005-07-16 23:31:01

Always I've been using BASH, but I'd reallly like to learn some other environment like zsh

iBertus · 2005-07-17 06:04:32

i've always just used bash.

iphitus · 2005-07-17 06:11:20

most people couldnt care less and just use what it comes with.

zsh has little things I like about it, little extra stuff. Like more powerful completion. Sure bash *can* do it, but it takes a ridiculous amount of scripting to do what zsh can do in one line, nor is it as fast.

my zshrc is here:
https://iphitus.no-ip.org/configs/shellrc
https://iphitus.no-ip.org/configs/zshrc
if anyone's interested.

max_sipos · 2005-07-17 15:25:37

I get 404 errors when I try to access those files

iphitus · 2005-07-17 16:11:32

fixed

johnisevil · 2005-09-01 15:48:15

iphitus, 404 errors when attempting to access those config files.

LB06 · 2005-09-02 15:32:26

I mainly use bash on my laptop, but I voted tcsh because in, FreeBSD it has some really awesome features. But when I install it on Arch those features are pretty much absent. So I sticked to bash, since I do not have the time to configure my shell properly. Bash is the only shell that comes preconfigured, I guess.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-07-15 20:26:35

shell recommendations

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Re: shell recommendations

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