Invest some time getting to know KSH93 and you may well find you begin to prefer it over Bash. In many respects KSH was the father of modern shells as many of them incorporated ideas and features first seen in KSH. It hasn't seen a lot of recent active development because there hasn't been much need - KSH was ahead of its time I do wish David et.al. would get on the stick w/a bit of updating for the new millennium though but I'm sure he has more interesting things to do these days and has earned the right to kick back, relax, and put his feet up .....

bash
bash
bash

Considering bash is the default shell on every GNU/Linux I've seen, I would expect that to get the majority of votes by far. I voted for sh. Even though I don't use it much interactively, writing Bourne scripts helps with portability across different *nixes.

I'm getting the distinct feeling that there will be one vote for fish. Mine.

This isn't an attack, so cool your jets. I've just started using Linux as my daily desktop work env. I've used Linux and BSD for years, but always as a black-box server-type appliance. Anyway, I've never really used BASH (or CSH) for real scripting, but today I needed something universal, so took the plunge.

All I needed was a little string manipulation, ie. strindex(), strcat(), strcpy(), etc. In 2007, I had pipe bet two or three diff pgms, not the most readble code I've ever written. Why are we still doing it this way ? Aren't BASH and CSH from the mid-'80s ? If memory servers, C itself is thirty years old ! My personal pref is Python, but why not a true C interpreter ? RAM and storage have been so cheap for so long, that many LQ members have only heard of those old constraints.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that the older shells should be removed from the system, merely asking why the Linux/BSD/Unix world is so conservative about this subj. BTW, I got started at a time when virtually all programming jobs were for COBOL coders and you couldn't even buy (well, there was XENIX) UNIX !

my vote sh.

zsh. I used to almost exclusively use bash, with some exceptions of tcsh use, but now with the awesome tab completion and vi behavior I had to go with zsh.

I feel like throwing a bash bash.

bash. feature rich, and as far as I'm concerned omni-present.
Even comes with Solaris ;}



Cheers,
Tink

And how do I pipe output of some program into my python or C-program
if I have no shell to run it from? shells are the glue (use the force Luke!)
that hold the system together ;}


Cheers,
Tink

Bash since it's all I ever really use. It works so why change? I have yet to wake up and say to myself, "I think I'll use my time on this planet today to see if there's a better shell out there." It's just not priority.

I've used nothing but bash? Any reason to try the others?

Hmm... am I Korn/KSH voter #1?

I use bash most of the time by default, but for my workplace, Korn was a better fit. It's like comparing flathead and philips to me: most of what I can do in one, I can do in another...

No, I think that would be me. You can be #2 though. Welcome to the land of the free thinking

<offtopic>Actually I voted before semisonique... yeah, whatever...</offtopic>

Yay, KSH! ^^