shells?

sycamorex · 11-10-2008, 11:00 PM

It might be an ignorant question, but why do you use some shells other than bash?
I might be wrong because I don't work in the IT sector, but I assume bash is the industry standard, so why do you use other shells? What advantages do they have over bash?

chrism01 · 11-11-2008, 12:40 AM

Its a question of history and personal preference. If you google, you'll find the orig shell was sh (Bourne shell), also csh.
Then ksh (much more modern, similar to bash, but more common on commercial Unix eg HP-UX, Solaris).
Old csh was limited, so we got tcsh and eventually bash (Bourne-again shell, mostly on Linux).
We also have zsh, ash etc etc.
sh now is the POSIX shell.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_shell

sycamorex · 11-11-2008, 05:37 PM

Thanks for your reply. I was just wondering if there's any need to learn (at least basics) of some other shells. I read the wikipedia article and zsh looks interesting, I'll give it a (quick) try. I guess it's like with everything in linux - Everything is a also matter of choice/preference

JZL240I-U · 11-14-2008, 01:15 AM

Very well: http://zsh.sunsite.dk/Guide/zshguide.html