mac osx and bash

sulekha · 08-31-2008, 08:50 AM

Hi ,

I have read in the book "Ubuntu Linux Tool Box" by Christopher Negus
and Francois caen that: bash is the shell used by default by most modern linux systems and quite few other operating systems such as Mac OSX.

1 To what extent these statements are true especially regarding Mac OSX
2 why Mac OSX is providing a bash shell ?

uselpa · 08-31-2008, 03:20 PM

1. bash is the default shell for most Linux distros and also for Mac OS X. It is not the default shell for *BSD, for example.
2. A lot of things can be done on a shell level in Mac OS X, it's not a GUI-only system.

chort · 08-31-2008, 11:45 PM

Code:

[chort@horus4 chort]$ uname -a
Darwin horus4.smtps.net 8.11.1 Darwin Kernel Version 8.11.1: Wed Oct 10 18:23:28 PDT 2007; root:xnu-792.25.20~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 i386
[chort@horus4 chort]$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash

Bash is the shell that most novice users are likely to be familiar with, hence why OS X uses it (instead of say, ksh).

sundialsvcs · 09-02-2008, 05:07 PM

For all the "pretty Macintosh picture" that OS/X works so hard to create, underneath that cover there beats the strong heart of ... Unix. Shell and all.

roystonlodge · 09-27-2008, 11:38 AM

...for all the talk of OS X's command-line power "under the hood", the standard install is missing a lot of common *nix apps. I discovered this when I tried to use the "make install" command in Terminal.

Luckily, this is easily fixed.

If you download Rudix from Apple's website (here's the link http://www.apple.com/downloads/macos...rce/rudix.html), you get WAY more of the common *nix apps, and your Mac Command-Line will hummmmmmm....

Apple has more *nix goodness at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/.

For even more *nix goodness, download MacPorts (http://www.macports.org) and/or Fink (http://www.finkproject.org), package managers that are very very very similar to Debian's package manager.

For a MacPorts GUI there's Porticus (http://porticus.alittledrop.com).

For a Fink GUI you can choose between FinkCommander (free http://finkcommander.sourceforge.net/) or Phynchronicity (not free http://www.codebykevin.com/phynchronicity.html).