How do you know? He might have voted as the first
person all together and not commented on the thread.

that is why those who have commented are mostly those clear looser in the balloting ... ^_^


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Well my friend... before you get all cocky with your superiority I am curious as to whether you might enlighten us with a brief history of the various shells you've used and a comparison/contrast of each? Ah... I thought so...

I never take these polls as any kind of merit based competition but rather more of a popularity contest based on marketing and mindshare, as it is obvious many of the voters have minimal experience with *nix. And that is all well and good. Just don't forget to call it for what it is and take it all with a grain of salt. Oh, and if you care to open your mind, you might just learn something. For example, I've probably been using *nix since before you were born but prior to this year's pageant, I was unfamiliar with VLC. Comments from others prompted me to take a look at it and I was pleasantly surprised. It's not going to replace my preferred app but my significant other quite likes it on their Winblows box.

To wit..... there are no real winners or loosers as it's all about personal preference and choice. And that, my friend, is what it is really all about :-)

I use bash ... does it matter ?

Bash and Bash and Bash

Taking a look at the results shows that the Z shell (zsh) came in second and for good reason.

It's because it can do everything that bash can do plus more. Bash on steroids.

Is it too late to vote for Windows Powershell?

bash. I'm so newbie that I really don't see a lot of differences. occasionally use sh or zsh just for heck of it.

what is all these? What is shell? i am a newbie.

Later when you've used the command line more, you'll like how the Z shell (zsh) can be configured to behave like either emacs or vi. There's so much power available based on choice of shell that I still feel like a newb (I kinda am when it comes to shells other than csh/tcsh and bash).

Currently I've been using zsh because I like the vi/emacs behavior, tab completion, right hand prompts. Although since I just started using it before going off to college, I haven't had much time to really experiment with it (just finishing the Gentoo install for my laptop).

EDIT: For the "what is a shell" question: Have you had to use the command line (a terminal where you type stuff in to the right of a '$' or '%', maybe even '#')? The program that reacts to this typing inside the terminal is actually the shell. The terminal program just lets you give instructions to this program. You should have a '$' if you're using Linux (unless you're sharing the machine with someone who changed what shells each user has), which indicates you're using bash (usually).

Choice of shell also defines certain behavior. For example, zsh will show me the names of all the files/arguements if there are multiple that start with 'h', then press tab to cycle through those. I also can use commands from the vi text editor to manipulate what I've typed in (I even have to switch between text entry and command modes).

>> "what is all these? What is shell? i am a newbie."

you wouldnt want to see people start answering that question ... right ?? ^_^

as for gotfw ... i have only use bash in my life(i think so) ... it seem(as least for me) so new and younger ...

probably its quite hard for me to differentiate between "no-brainer" pascal(too fast) and bash(or shell ??) ...

and thats why i dont vote for anything in this poll ... a bit weird for me ...

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So the shell is more or less equivalent to MS-DOS?

in a sense ... yes ... and that is why i dont understand why some people are so fond of shells , as if there are really no other better ways to do everythings on their desktops ...


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Because of the "in a sense" I'm going to skip over my criticism of this part of your post.

Just FYI, however, there is nothing you do on your desktop that isn't just a gui layered on top of commands that you could enter into a shell. Therefore you are wrong. You can be far more precise and efficient doing things on the command line if you know how. I mean, if you don't learn to use the cli then you're missing out on the POWER of *nix (IMO), which would be a shame.

I use three shells: bash is my /bin/sh (usually, although ksh has been seen there too), zsh for root, and tcsh for my user account.

Zsh got a bum rap here, it deserves better. What other shells have an ftp client built-in, can byte-compile their own scripts or guard against dangerous rm * things? I even saw an IRC client written entirely in zsh scripting.