I suppose you wouldn't trade your horse for a car, given that people have been able to get where they're going no problem for hundreds (thousands?) of years on them. I also suppose you won't be upgrading your kernel ever, since your current one is working fine. If you're going to insist on bash, at least have a reason, rather than 'because it's what I've always used'.

Also, zsh has come up a few times in this thread - massive recommendations for anyone who's not smitten with bash. By default, zsh is a much heavier (by shell standards), slightly superior shell. With a good, customized .zshrc, you'll cringe every time you're forced to use bash, even if it's only just to get off a chsh.

I believe you have missed out the topic of the thread. "Is Bash crap?".

You are right, I have never upgraded kernel drivers. But that DOES NOT mean, bash shell is crap. Bash shell may not be apt for "certain particular advanced things", but calling it kludge+crap is mean. Rather, it would be better to post its authors about the limitations.

INMHO I DO NOT feel to give reason because I and many more posters of this thread are satisfied with bash. And till now I have accomplished my needs with bash. We would love to explore other shells like zsh,ksh etc. But not for the reason of this "crap shell".

All this is my perspective.

No, I saw it. I'm not saying bash is crap, but it doesn't have to be objectively bad for it to be worth replacing. (For the record, I think bash is solid, but obsoleted. You can probably guess what by.) Don't be a dinosaur, man; give new software a chance and you'll like what you get.

Er, I hope that's not true or I'm misunderstanding you. If you don't upgrade your kernel, you are sitting on a pile of vulnerabilities that anyone can google up. This isn't a matter of whether it's worth switching to something new; it's just basic good practice.

I am little human , ready to explore new things BUT at the same time not criticizing the present.


By upgrading, I mean I have never written kernel codes or tried modifying them.

Then I highly, highly recommend you check this out. Trying a new shell is a particularly harmless thing, but don't try it on a work machine if you want to be super safe about it. Three bits I'll try to sell you on, plus what is probably the big one:
1. Do you know that ** glob that bash has as of version 4? zsh has had that for as long as I can remember. (If you don't, it matches all files, directories, and the contents of all those directories recursively. I used it today as `~/music/**/*.mp3 piped to wc to count my mp3 files.`)
2. zsh will correct your typos. Not automatically, of course, as that would be dangerous, but fixing a small typo can consist of pressing 'y' to fix it instead of having to go up and fix it yourself.
3. Not everyone who uses zsh uses this, but I can't imagine why not - a right prompt. In my case, I put pwd in there instead of the normal prompt. The effect is that my regular prompt is fixed-width, long paths grow from the right, where there's tons of space, and the first character that would be impeded by the right prompt causes it to temporarily disappear until you get your prompt back.
And 4. zsh's autocompletion just wipes the floor with everything else I've ever seen. It completes ssh. It completes a few thousand commands (including options) or something out of the box, and you can program more. It completes on remote filesystems if you have passwordless public key set up.
I'll stop there because I could gush about zsh all day if you let me. Suffice to say that there's bread and cheese on your side of the wall, sure, but we're eating ice cream for dinner everyday, and somehow it never gets old.

No problem, then. I was merely making a comparison between not switching to the best shell you have available to you and not upgrading your kernel, if 'because this works' is to be taken as a good reason. Incidentally, I haven't uninstalled bash or anything - sh is still a link to bash because zsh takes a lot longer (again, in shell terms - I get a prompt instantly when I open a new terminal) to start up, and you don't need it to run init scripts.

I agree. Which is why I retracted the remark and apologized further on up the thread. I was happy to be disabused of my ignorance and modified my views once informed of Bash's origins and development.
Some folks here have been pretty helpful in suggesting alternative shells; in particular the Z shell sounds very promising. Hopefully one day it'll replace Bash as the default for the bulk of Linux distros. Bash isn't "crap" - I now freely admit - but it's rather limited compared to some of the alternatives.

Is the Bourne shell on Linux, free, the actual shell, the full shell exactly how it is on UNIX? I've read about sh being like it, and that there are things you can do to use the POSIX features of the shells ... but how similar are they, really?
(I apologize if this is a Google question.)

While better shells have come along, I've stuck to what is available as standard so my scripts and skills are portable -- beginning with Bourne (althoug ksh was way better), then ksh, then POSIX and now bash.

I learned that lesson hard as a contractor when I'd got used to the delights of emacs, especially as a development editor, then worked at a site where they didn't have it and wouldn't install it :-( Since then I've stuck to vi -- "good enough" and (almost!) universally available.

Come to think of it, that's a good reason for choosing bash shellscript over other programming languages -- it will run on any Linux system. It has to -- because half of Linux is written in it!

Hello Joe If bash' POSIX mode is turned on then it is (OEE), exactly the same as any other POSIX conforming shell. The Bourne shell is a long way from POSIX compliance; a lot of the inspiration for the POSIX shell standard was the Korn shell, ksh, and it was quite a jump from Bourne to Korn.

I apologize for what's probably a simple question, I've just read that sh is the Bourne shell, but was confused as to whether or not it's "pretty much the Bourne shell".

I believe 'ash' is a clone of the Bourne shell. 'sh' is often a symbolic link to one of the other shells on most linux distros.

ash is lightweight bash and is often used to run startup scripts (faster than bash).
Yep, sh is often a symbolic link that exists mainly to ensure compatibility with scripts that require the original bourne shell.

ISTR there's also a dash as well. A lightweight shell for Debian based systems. er, I think.

I was about to say I can't understand people like yourself who use these counter-intuitive editors that take a month of sundays to learn. But then I thought if you've been in the industry for like 40 years, it might just be what you've grown used to. Personally I never use anything but nano. It's great. Nice and simple.

I always use vim, but I've never really tried emacs. It seems bloated to me. Vim is very complete and seems more to-the-point as an editor. I don't have a good opinion, though, since I haven't really used emacs.
Nano is good, but very simple.