If this is located wrong, please move it. It seems to fit here to me, but I may have misunderstood something somewhere.

I was looking through a book in the bookstore today on Shell Scripts, and it had a list of the shells (t/csh, bash, sh, ksh), and what all they supported, ect., and it got me to thinking: What all would people want in a shell?

Personally, I've used bash alot, and really like it, but when you think about it, the shell scripting is a bit akward at times, and I was wondering,

why not make a shell with a general-purpose scripting language? Something like Ruby or Lua, or maybe Perl/Python.

Compile in grep/awk/ect so you don't have hundreds of scripts/programs mixed in with the shell, and maybe speed it up slightly (as if it isn't fast enough as is).

Problem I see with that are updates/security fixes. With things like Portage, YaST2, and a few of the package managers, that wouldn't be that big a deal (Portage would have a nice addition to it: Could compile in what you want and leave out what you don't), but outside that, you'd probably have to recompile it each time you updated it.

Anyways, I'm just curious as to what people would want in a multi-featured, fully functional shell.

Personally, I'm happy enough with Bash as it exists. Tab completion and a working history are my main requirements. And I have no problem invoking awk, sed, grep, etc., so having them compiled into the shell wouldn't buy me anything.

I'm a zsh man myself but there are a massive variety of shells around, fish being one of the more interesting ones and one that sounds like it might catch your attention