my vote sh.

zsh. I used to almost exclusively use bash, with some exceptions of tcsh use, but now with the awesome tab completion and vi behavior I had to go with zsh.

I feel like throwing a bash bash.

bash. feature rich, and as far as I'm concerned omni-present.
Even comes with Solaris ;}



Cheers,
Tink

And how do I pipe output of some program into my python or C-program
if I have no shell to run it from? shells are the glue (use the force Luke!)
that hold the system together ;}


Cheers,
Tink

Bash since it's all I ever really use. It works so why change? I have yet to wake up and say to myself, "I think I'll use my time on this planet today to see if there's a better shell out there." It's just not priority.

I've used nothing but bash? Any reason to try the others?

Hmm... am I Korn/KSH voter #1?

I use bash most of the time by default, but for my workplace, Korn was a better fit. It's like comparing flathead and philips to me: most of what I can do in one, I can do in another...

No, I think that would be me. You can be #2 though. Welcome to the land of the free thinking :)

<offtopic>Actually I voted before semisonique... yeah, whatever...</offtopic>

Yay, KSH! ^^

How do you know? He might have voted as the first
person all together and not commented on the thread.

that is why those who have commented are mostly those clear looser in the balloting ... ^_^


.

Well my friend... before you get all cocky with your superiority I am curious as to whether you might enlighten us with a brief history of the various shells you've used and a comparison/contrast of each? Ah... I thought so...

I never take these polls as any kind of merit based competition but rather more of a popularity contest based on marketing and mindshare, as it is obvious many of the voters have minimal experience with *nix. And that is all well and good. Just don't forget to call it for what it is and take it all with a grain of salt. Oh, and if you care to open your mind, you might just learn something. For example, I've probably been using *nix since before you were born but prior to this year's pageant, I was unfamiliar with VLC. Comments from others prompted me to take a look at it and I was pleasantly surprised. It's not going to replace my preferred app but my significant other quite likes it on their Winblows box.

To wit..... there are no real winners or loosers as it's all about personal preference and choice. And that, my friend, is what it is really all about :-)

funny poll ...
 

I use bash ... does it matter ? :scratch:

Bash and Bash and Bash

Taking a look at the results shows that the Z shell (zsh) came in second and for good reason.

It's because it can do everything that bash can do plus more. Bash on steroids.

Is it too late to vote for Windows Powershell?

bash. I'm so newbie that I really don't see a lot of differences. occasionally use sh or zsh just for heck of it.

what is all these? What is shell? i am a newbie.

Later when you've used the command line more, you'll like how the Z shell (zsh) can be configured to behave like either emacs or vi. There's so much power available based on choice of shell that I still feel like a newb (I kinda am when it comes to shells other than csh/tcsh and bash).

Currently I've been using zsh because I like the vi/emacs behavior, tab completion, right hand prompts. Although since I just started using it before going off to college, I haven't had much time to really experiment with it (just finishing the Gentoo install for my laptop).

EDIT: For the "what is a shell" question: Have you had to use the command line (a terminal where you type stuff in to the right of a '$' or '%', maybe even '#')? The program that reacts to this typing inside the terminal is actually the shell. The terminal program just lets you give instructions to this program. You should have a '$' if you're using Linux (unless you're sharing the machine with someone who changed what shells each user has), which indicates you're using bash (usually).

Choice of shell also defines certain behavior. For example, zsh will show me the names of all the files/arguements if there are multiple that start with 'h', then press tab to cycle through those. I also can use commands from the vi text editor to manipulate what I've typed in (I even have to switch between text entry and command modes).

>> "what is all these? What is shell? i am a newbie."

you wouldnt want to see people start answering that question ... right ?? ^_^

as for gotfw ... i have only use bash in my life(i think so) ... it seem(as least for me) so new and younger ...

probably its quite hard for me to differentiate between "no-brainer" pascal(too fast) and bash(or shell ??) ...

and thats why i dont vote for anything in this poll ... a bit weird for me ...

.

So the shell is more or less equivalent to MS-DOS?

in a sense ... yes ... and that is why i dont understand why some people are so fond of shells , as if there are really no other better ways to do everythings on their desktops ...


.

Because of the "in a sense" I'm going to skip over my criticism of this part of your post.

Just FYI, however, there is nothing you do on your desktop that isn't just a gui layered on top of commands that you could enter into a shell. Therefore you are wrong. You can be far more precise and efficient doing things on the command line if you know how. I mean, if you don't learn to use the cli then you're missing out on the POWER of *nix (IMO), which would be a shame.

I use three shells: bash is my /bin/sh (usually, although ksh has been seen there too), zsh for root, and tcsh for my user account.

Zsh got a bum rap here, it deserves better. What other shells have an ftp client built-in, can byte-compile their own scripts or guard against dangerous rm * things? I even saw an IRC client written entirely in zsh scripting.

The most functions?
 

If we were to give the championship to the shell with the most functions, you would have a hard time ignoring zsh, that is for sure. However, for routine every day use, Bash (and for that matter tcsh), have so much functionality that only extreme power users even need to resort to zsh. To be blunt, bash, pdksh, zsh, and tcsh have borrowed heavily from one another for the most popular features, and at this stage, though there are differences in their implementations and syntax, each of these shells offers a huge subset of equivalent functionality.

That said, with the way in which bash is set up on virtually all systems, there is no compelling reason to use zsh for most users and bash does an excellent job. Zsh is useful for doing stuff that no other interactive shell does, yet keeping compatibility with the Bourne shell. I get plenty of Bourne Shell compatibility with Bash, therefore I stick with it. I don't want to invest the incremental time to learn how much more I can get out of zsh because I can do so much already with Bash.

winning shell popularity is caused by its own ubiquity
 

Given that bash won by more than 89%, it's highly possible that result is caused by the possibility that bash is the only shell that most people ever used, which is itself caused by the fact that nearly all distributions (in fact, maybe all in total -- certainly all the ones that I know) use bash is the default shell, and sometimes don't even both to install any others in the "default" installation, if such an idea exists (e.g. as in Ubuntu). If this is the truth, as I posit that the popularity of the shell is resultant from its selection by distribution maintainers than fully by user choice (which has been altered [for better or worse] by distribution maintainers), then we can surmise two things: (1) that the poll is meaningless (of course, we knew this anyway, since it's a non-scientific poll) and (2) that people typically only use the shell that is given them, without either finding it necessary or interesting enough to check out the alternatives. It may also be suggested that, in the case that the preceding hypotheses are correct, most of the voters are not shell programmers (who would have both the reasons and the skills to use alternative shells, at least for sport if not for work, etc.) but just normal users who may even stay away from the command line altogether for most tasks, and voted only in passing selecting the only option with which they were familiar and had heard something about -- the ubiquitous Linux shell, bash.

"Bourne again" or "born again"
what so ever love bash