Shell Games

[Nicolas Mackintosh]

On 31 Dec 2004, at 02:45, Joshua Tinnin wrote:

> On Thursday 30 December 2004 06:09 pm, Mike Jeays
> <Mike.Jeays at rogers.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2004-12-30 at 20:15, John Murphy wrote:
>>> Mike Jeays <Mike.Jeays at rogers.com> wrote:
>>>> My personal preference is Bash. It is readily available on most
>>>> Unixes, and has a good selection of features.  I don't so much
>>>> like the csh/tcsh family, which have a somewhat different syntax.
>>>
>>> I particularly like the history mechanism which is enabled for the
>>> default csh/tcsh with FreeBSD.  The recent usage of any command is
>>> recalled by typing a few letters and then up arrow.  Bash probably
>>> can do it too and would have similar 'TAB' file name completion.
>>>
>>> But then - I remember thinking doskey was cool :)
>>
>> Bash has very similar features.  Most of the shells have borrowed the
>> good ideas from others, and you can compare this with evolutionary
>> convergence - good ideas tend to persist and be re-used.  Bash and
>> TCSH share features for the same reason that fish and dolphins are
>> similar shapes - it it the best solution to a problem.
>
> Incidentally, my favorite shell is zsh, which is a bit of a kitchen 
> sink
> approach, but it's quite powerful. It's intended to be a superset of
> ksh, but it incorporates many features of ksh, Bash and tcsh. Most
> people I know who started out in the *nix world running Linux prefer
> Bash, because that's the default shell. Like others have said, it
> doesn't really matter that much what shell you prefer, as long as you
> learn the one you have and know it's strengths/weaknesses and can work
> with them.
>
> - jt
>
>> Fully agree about DOSKEY - it made the awful Windows command line a
>> little bit more tolerable.

While I'm fairly new to the whole BSD experience, I've dabbled with 
various Linux builds over a year or two.

I've always looked at the shell as a very personal thing. Some will 
prefer Bash, others will want to play with something completely 
different. It's a bit like having a favorite hammer... Only a lot more 
elegant!


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