Shells

[Hammer]

Bash away!

[crazyjimbo]

Bash away!

The only reason I had for coming in to this thread has already been done.

Are there any real alternatives to bash? I know there are alternatives, but do any of them compete with bash in terms of usability, widespreadness and features?

[d3adf001]

ksh looks pretty cool but i will never use any features so bash it is.

[EvanED]

zsh.

** patterns are a killer feature, IMO. Something like **/*.c will expand to list all files that match *.c from the current directory, recursively.

[xyzzy]

Well, I use bash on my machine, and zsh on boogeyman.

I quite like rc and es though, but never got into using them properly.

[photosinensis]

I think the only purpose of this thread was achieved in the first post.

But seriously? The Bourne Again Shell ftw.

[Yakk]

vish!

(Yes, a friend of mine claimed to have written a shell in vi macros...)

[bigglesworth]

Shells are not durable enough and so are a worse physical currency than metal coins, despite their faults.

[zenten]

I like the blue shells myself.

[Hammer]

If you put a shell to your ear, you can hear a programmer complaining about the ocean.

[evilbeanfiend]

If you put a shell to your ear, you can hear a programmer complaining about the ocean.

only if its csh

[FACM]

ash, for what i've seen of it, is totally worthless. It was a 'recovery' shell, but that's not worth a whole lot when it won't acknowledge keyboard input.

[zenten]

ash, for what i've seen of it, is totally worthless. It was a 'recovery' shell, but that's not worth a whole lot when it won't acknowledge keyboard input.

Wait, it doesn't handle keyboard input?

As in, it's not a shell?

[tehmoth]

pdksh as /bin/sh with set -o vi ; set -o vi-tabcomplete

[Ghorthas]

Zsh forever, and ever, and ever.

[Pobega]

I have /bin/dash linked to /bin/sh, and for my userspace I use /bin/tcsh, which I find to be highly customizable, very quick, and extremely easy to use. But writing the configuration files takes a hell of a long time to do.

[Citizen K]

Recently I had to use a plain vanilla Solaris 8 installation that had nothing but the most basic sh installed. No, vanilla would be a big step up. This was unflavored paste. Getting various packages copied over and installed to get bash up and running was just so painful. No command history, no autocomplete (but stupidly long filenames to type), and (probably due to the KVM it was on) the backspace key didn't work. After that, I'm willing to deal with just about any shell that has those basics working.

[FACM]

Wait, it doesn't handle keyboard input?

As in, it's not a shell?

It looked like a shell, and I imagine that it was set up to take keyboard input. It had a nice little prompt, but nothing I typed would show up on screen. This might have had something to do with missing drivers or a major misconfiguration somewhere, but the fact that I could hit the buttons to start the recovery shell indicated that something went wrong AFTER ash started up.

After that, I wiped that disto and tried a different one. Can't remember the offender or the replacement, though.

[evilbeanfiend]

Wait, it doesn't handle keyboard input?

As in, it's not a shell?

It looked like a shell, and I imagine that it was set up to take keyboard input. It had a nice little prompt, but nothing I typed would show up on screen. This might have had something to do with missing drivers or a major misconfiguration somewhere, but the fact that I could hit the buttons to start the recovery shell indicated that something went wrong AFTER ash started up.

After that, I wiped that disto and tried a different one. Can't remember the offender or the replacement, though.

did you try ctrl-q, the number of times i've accidentally put a scroll lock on a shell and then been confused as to why its unresponsive is very silly

[Anpheus]

Real men (and women) don't use shells, they build their own minicomputer complete with single-bit toggles and LEDs on the front for I/O.

(Do you have any idea how long it takes to read a web page or the xkcd comic that way?)

[Yakk]

Real men (and women) don't use shells, they build their own minicomputer complete with single-bit toggles and LEDs on the front for I/O.

(Do you have any idea how long it takes to read a web page or the xkcd comic that way?)

Do yuo v ny d hw loong i teks 2 pst/?

[Anpheus]

Having to read the TCP packets in binary and put them together by hand is a learning experience you won't ever forget. Just make sure to keep checking those headers, you never know when you might get one from an unknown source.