What is your favourite shell?

nrl · Guru Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 446 Location: Glasgow, UK

Just wondering what shell you people use as I was recently thinking about trying some alternatives to bash. I took this list from the app-shells section of the Gentoo online package database. Oh and please reply with why you like your shell

earlNameless · n00b Joined: 01 Apr 2003 Posts: 47

bash it is. it is installed by default, and since, i am afraid of change

, i keep on using it

masseya · Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2003 10:31 pm Post subject:

Moving from Gentoo Chat as this is not specifically related to Gentoo.
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Gibberx · Apprentice Joined: 20 Oct 2002 Posts: 217 Location: UMBC

There are other choices??!!! :wink:

abergou · Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2003 10:44 pm Post subject:

woo hoo bash ;-)

.... I hear zsh has some nifty features though so I may give it a try sometime when I'm feeling particularly brave.....

nrl · Guru Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 446 Location: Glasgow, UK

magnet · Guru Joined: 16 Mar 2003 Posts: 582 Location: france

hello ,

I used to use zsh , a really cool shell. but since I discovererd the extented bash completion,I use now bash

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idl · Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2003 12:40 am Post subject:

anything without tab completion is crap IMO

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Valen · Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2003 2:22 am Post subject:

zsh and scsh are the two which have really caught my interest. I have played around with zsh quite a bit and I will probably switch over once I get a bit more comfortable (I'm using bash right now). scsh looks really interesting but I haven't used it enough to make any judgements about it. If you are looking for an alternative to bash I don't think you will be dissapointed with zsh.

magnet · Guru Joined: 16 Mar 2003 Posts: 582 Location: france

port001 , yea right

but I was talking about :

idl · Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2003 11:36 am Post subject:

magnet · Guru Joined: 16 Mar 2003 Posts: 582 Location: france

w0rd

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zephyr1256 · Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2003 1:41 pm Post subject:

You should learn one shell and learn it well.

Something a professor told me a few semesters ago in a Linux class. Basically, we used bash in the class, because it is so standard and common. You can find it practically anywhere(at least in my experience). I often find that other shell names are links to bash anyway, if I go looking.

Jarjar · Apprentice Joined: 21 Jul 2002 Posts: 263 Location: Sweden

Why isn't there a shell named trash? :lol:

I'll stick with bash.
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cnf · Posted: Wed May 21, 2003 6:35 pm Post subject:

tcsh all the way :-)

i work on multiple oses (linux, bsd, tru64, hpux, ...) and tcsh is available on all of them
bash isnt (unless u want to get into the trouble of finding/installing it on whatever os)

on top of that, tcsh is at least as extensive as bash, if not more so
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guero61 · l33t Joined: 14 Oct 2002 Posts: 811 Location: Behind you

If you work in a production UNIX environment, chances are you are forced to use Korn like myself... I've become accustomed to it, but everyone else uses bash, so I must be well-versed in both...

UnderScore · Posted: Wed May 21, 2003 8:11 pm Post subject:

DOS!!

/me ducks.

DuF · Advocate Joined: 09 Dec 2002 Posts: 2609 Location: Paris

I used lot of time ksh (not in this poll) but I prefer bash on my linux

antik · Apprentice Joined: 01 Oct 2002 Posts: 212

Hypnos · Posted: Thu May 22, 2003 6:10 am Post subject:

I like bash ... easy to program (not idiosyncratic like csh/tcsh), and you can run the program just by typing the name. I've tried psh, but I get confused by typing commands directly inside a bunch of perl syntax. In bash/sh, the syntax seems to flow well with these random program names.
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snutte · Posted: Thu May 22, 2003 3:26 pm Post subject:

Ive growned into bash so to speak. Used it since i started with linux in 97.

Oopsz · Guru Joined: 08 Oct 2002 Posts: 340

http://nadvsh.sourceforge.net/

new adventure shell!

masseya · Posted: Thu May 22, 2003 9:16 pm Post subject:

zrajm · Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2003 12:32 am Post subject:

I use zsh. Reasons for me liking zsh:

Wonderful globbing. One can easily make globs matching recursivelly, or matching a files older (or newer) than a specified time, or files belonging to a specific user (or group) or with a specific bit set, or (of course) matching a normal filename pattern.

Nice variable handling. Arrays, scalars and -- tada! -- hashes are easily available. Good for advanced scripting. One can also make "uniq":ed lists (in which no element will occur twice) and arrays tied to scalars. (By default there is an array $path which is the list version of $PATH. Add a path to the array $path, and it will automatically appear in your $PATH. -- If you also use the uniqued version, then no path will ever appear twice.)
This can be done with any array/scalar pair (good for $TEXINPUTS, $LS_COLORS etc.).

Tab completion. Completes not only filenames, but also other arguments for all the builtin commands, and several others like 'ls', 'man', 'gv', 'gzip', 'zip' etc... The completion is totally (but unfortunately not totally intuitively) configurable.

Help function. -- Press Esc-h after writing a command at the prompt and the man page for that command appears, when you've finished reading you're returned to the exact same point in the command line. -- Good for quickly looking up a specific option or similar, while typing a command.

Command line history.
Searchable command line history (which I guess is standard every decent shell?). There is also something called history completion, which looks like it could do useful things, but which I haven't yet tried out myself.

Other things. Global aliases (which simply means that any word [and not just the first] in a command line can be made an alias -- e.g. one could make an "alias -g 'L'='| less'" so than when something needs to be piped to less one can simply add a capital L to the end of the command). Highly configurable prompt. Nice 'hooks' for custom things (you can defined functions which are automatically run, before a prompt, after a prompt, at specific time intervals etc. -- I use this to update the window title in my xterm to always reflect the current command running; so I run the command "less README" then my window title will show this, until I return to the prompt).

Zsh is also highly configurable, and it is very easy to neutralize, reset and test the configuration settings (which is very useful in scripts, to guarantee an environment in which the script will work without any unwanted side effects).

-- That't why zsh is my shell of choice. And the more I use it, the more I like it.
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frippz · Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2003 1:14 am Post subject:

bash it is for me as well. It came with every distro I used, AFAIK.
I started to toy with FreeBSD recently and when I realized that it came with csh I almost went ballistic of fear and whacked bash in as fast as I could.

Show how conservative I am...