Shell of the Year
 

A new category last year, and a run-away poll.

--jeremy

GO fish!

Seriously though can fish be considered?

Bash. Fish did catch my eye but I never really got around to installing it...

I like fish syntax highlighting but I'm sticking to bash because it benifits from being univerisal.

bash, bashes the rest ? ghehe, no j/k. But i like bash.

Definitely bash for me, but I have a few friends who are tcsh devotees. I've wanted to sit down seriously with fish or zsh as they both look really cool, but I just have never been motivated to do so.

I know bash will take it, but I had to vote for tcsh. As for the conception that bash is universal... it's one of my biggest pet peeves. It's universal in Linux, true... but not universally. :p

Of course bash!!

I vote for bash

King Bash...

You know, has anyone ever posted a good comparason of shells?

I voted for ZSH because it has the best command completion. FISH is pretty good as well.

Voted for bash, even though the fact bash is probably the most popular default shell doesn't mean it's the best. But bash is the best for me. At least for now. Lets see again in 1 year when I have more experience with other shell types ;)

Vote! It's a privilege!

Bash
 

Hard to say anything about the others, but I've always used just Bash. I guess I'll have to check other some day.

Agreed. I voted bash but As you said it is only universal on linux. The AIX server at work uses the ksh shell and my BSD machine uses the tcsh shell.

There is more then one shell ? LOL. Bash got my vote.

I voted for bash. It's well Known to me..

2007, Year of the BASH!!! :)

Was a long time tcsh user in UNIX; switched over to bash in 2000, and stayed with it ever since.

i vote for bash.

Bash it up Bash it up.. I like bash, there isnt an option for me really.

Bash.

Not necessarily the best, it's the one I use all the time so it's the one I'm most familiar with. I haven't really messed with the rest.

well I voted for bash then went looking for app of the year to vote for Yakuake. Lacking any other place to vote for it I am back here to complain.(what a novel event on a web forum;-))

Since installing Yakuake it has beccome a must have app for me and is one of the first things I add after a new install.

bash. period. no arguments!

I really know and use only bash.

Bash.....Fish looks interesting, I will check it out.

ZSH all the way! bash wins because people haven't tried many shells.

bash won this one. It's everywhere, just like vi.

bash i think is the most used, and i like it

bash (don't know the differences of the others)

Hello,

While I use both BASH and TCSH, I enjoy using TCSH more for general purpose use. While BASH may arguably be the more robust shell to program in, I find TCSH to be more appealing aesthetically and syntactically. And since I don't program that much in the shell, the latter appeal wins out.

The one and only and still #1 = Bash

Bash I think

bash... no question here...

Of course bash will win due to default on many, if not all, Linux distros. KSH93 is also a very nice shell though. Too bad there's been a bug in the latest version since many, many months now that has not been remedied. Although I primarily use bash, I prefer KSH. Fish I've never used but it looks interesting.

I mostly use bash but I like ksh.

I only use bash on my machines.

Bash. In this case familiarity has bred contentedness.

Does this not bother anyone?

If I had had fish when I first started ...

If anyone knows of one, i'd be really interested.

I've not started any shell scripting, and am only fairly autonomous at the command line, but it'd probably be an idea to know the merits of the different shells before I get too attached to one.

While I know of most of the choices, bash is the only one i've used, so it seems a little unfair to vote.

The answer to questions such as this will always be that it's a matter of personal preference so try a few out and see which you like best. While many shells include "value add" features that are attractive to some I recommend you stick with a shell that strives for POSIX compliance, such as Bash or KSH93. Classic Shell Scripting, by Robbins & Beebe (O'Reilly) would be a good place to start.

Dash?
 

Where's dash?

what can I say, I'm a basher ;)

Ever so slightly old, but still useful.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/sh...l-differences/

I use/voted for bash. I've played with tcsh, ksh, zsh, and various posix-y shells like dash and 'sh's on BSD or from the Heirloom project and whatnot. Maybe some others. From playing with tcsh, I put

in my ~/.inputrc, and things like that, but I've never seen anything in any other shell to make me want to invest the time into another shell that I've invested in bash. Though, granted, if I'd started with ksh, the same would probably apply.

Invest some time getting to know KSH93 and you may well find you begin to prefer it over Bash. In many respects KSH was the father of modern shells as many of them incorporated ideas and features first seen in KSH. It hasn't seen a lot of recent active development because there hasn't been much need - KSH was ahead of its time :) I do wish David et.al. would get on the stick w/a bit of updating for the new millennium though but I'm sure he has more interesting things to do these days and has earned the right to kick back, relax, and put his feet up .....

bash
bash
bash

Considering bash is the default shell on every GNU/Linux I've seen, I would expect that to get the majority of votes by far. I voted for sh. Even though I don't use it much interactively, writing Bourne scripts helps with portability across different *nixes.

I'm getting the distinct feeling that there will be one vote for fish. Mine.

Doesn't Anyone Find This Archaic ?
 

This isn't an attack, so cool your jets. I've just started using Linux as my daily desktop work env. I've used Linux and BSD for years, but always as a black-box server-type appliance. Anyway, I've never really used BASH (or CSH) for real scripting, but today I needed something universal, so took the plunge.

All I needed was a little string manipulation, ie. strindex(), strcat(), strcpy(), etc. In 2007, I had pipe bet two or three diff pgms, not the most readble code I've ever written. Why are we still doing it this way ? Aren't BASH and CSH from the mid-'80s ? If memory servers, C itself is thirty years old ! My personal pref is Python, but why not a true C interpreter ? RAM and storage have been so cheap for so long, that many LQ members have only heard of those old constraints.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that the older shells should be removed from the system, merely asking why the Linux/BSD/Unix world is so conservative about this subj. BTW, I got started at a time when virtually all programming jobs were for COBOL coders and you couldn't even buy (well, there was XENIX) UNIX ! :)