Re: Shell Philosophy (Re: bash shell)

[Dave Taira <bodhi@hagakure.org>]

On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, Claus wrote:

> What shell(s) do you suggest I should and shouldn't use.

I can't really think of any you shouldn't use (barring, err,
specialist shells like perlsh or adventsh). Plain Bourne
shell is somewhat painful on the commandline, but *is* what
you should write scripts in. It's the most portable of the
shells, and is what startup scripts are written in.

bash, ksh and zsh are all supersets of Bourne. csh is not,
and includes behavior that is supposed to be (potentially)
more comfortable for C programmers. tcsh is a superset of
csh. bash, ksh, zsh and tcsh all support things like
command-completion, filename-completion, and command history.
Look over the features, and see if there are any you want
that they don't all support.

I started with tcsh, and switched to bash because there was
one thing I couldn't figure out how to do in tcsh that I could
in bash (with a function). I am considering a possible switch
to ksh because it has a significantly lower memory footprint.
I've played around with zsh; it's an uber-shell, with tons of
customization features. It's the emacs of shells. (I'd consider
bash/ksh/tcsh equivalent to vi, and sh as ed.)

Personally, I want to stick with Bourne shell derivatives
since I'm a sysadmin, and between the need to occasionally
read, write and poke at startup scripts, and the need for
portable scripts, sticking with Bourne syntax makes my life
easier.

See also:

http://www.oase-shareware.org/shell/
Particularly References, under Links

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/by-newsgroup/comp/comp.unix.shell.html
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| Dave Taira <bodhi@hagakure.org>                2001.01.17/10:41:27 PST |
| Morlock for Hire                                                       |
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