[TriLUG] OT: Linux/UNIX shell discussion

[Benjamin Reed]

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David R. Matusiak wrote:

> also along those lines, ksh (Korn shell, right?) is also very 
> customizable and presents happy hacking ground for shell coders.  my 
> predecessor was a ksh fanatic, thus i have books and cheat sheets galore 
> related to customizing the ksh shell.

Also, it's useful to note is that "POSIX" shell (the POSIX-standard form 
of bourne shell) is pretty much analogous to ksh.  That's one of the 
reasons it's recommended to learn ksh if you want to do any portable 
shell scripting.  It's one of the only constants you can pretty much 
assume will exist (much the same reason for learning vi, even if you 
have no plans to become proficient at it, you know it will be everywhere).

> personally, i've always been happy with bash.  it is easy.  and Mac OS X 
> sets the default terminal to tcsh - which is fine by me, as well.

Sure, I use bash on my osx laptop and csh on my g4, just to be sure I 
don't make any silly assumptions when doing stuff with Fink packaging. 
And for a user shell, use what you like, there's no reason not to.  :)

If you want to do shell *scripting* I'm suggesting ksh/POSIX bourne 
since it's most ubiquitous and is the subset of features you can assume 
to be everywhere.  Bash, even in "compatibility" mode (when called as 
/bin/sh) does some things the real POSIX shells don't, so it's easy to 
make mistakes that don't work on other systems without knowing it.  A 
lot of shell stuff that was developed on Linux didn't work on Mac OS X 
older than Jaguar because they used zsh as their /bin/sh, and it's 
stricter about quoting than bash was, even in compat mode.

- -- 
Benjamin Reed a.k.a. Ranger Rick -- http://ranger.befunk.com/
"You can scoff, Lister, that's nothing new.  They laughed at Galileo.
They laughed at Edison.  They laughed at Columbo."   "Who's Columbo?"
"The man with the dirty mac who discovered America."   -- _Red Dwarf_
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