Shell of the Year
 

A new category this year.

--jeremy

bash but trying to learn fish in my spare time.

bash because it became the standart.

FISH. Five minutes after using it, I said WHERE WERE YOU ALL MY LIFE and never went back.

Comparing FISH to ZSH proves that it's better to have good defaults and a lean design, than it is to have customizability (with the defaults all set to the wrong values) and the kitchen sink.

Haters gonna hate. Bash it is.

Regards.

Yea, and I don't really get all the bash bashing.

So I agree, bash it 'ism'.

You don't? Maybe you're shellshocked!

Only if he's been running an Apache server. ;)

I tried it out and I don't disagree at all.

Well, granted, that was a bad bit of code (hardly qualifies as a bug since it was a feature!). In fact, it was more like a well implemented but stupid idea!

But the bash bashing I refer to is not related really to shellshock, but more the frequent references to bash-isms and a kind of shell-snobbery that seems less good humored than say, vi vs emacs snobbery, or Slackware vs everything-else snobbery.

Features unique to bash are called bash-isms with a sneer, whereas features unique to other software are called... unique features.

Anyway, I unabashedly like bash. ;)

I like bash. But I've only used anything else for mere MOMENTS, so really have no great amount of experience to go with anything else. But then, since every distro I like defaults to bash, I've never had a HUGE reason to try something else (I figure if it's THAT much better, ONE of the distro's I liked would default to it).

I have tried others many times, but I don't really like the default behaviour of most alternatives. I have many bash scripts and bashisms are really good too, but if I had to go back in time and learn a shell, I'd go probably with ksh, because bash is really too slow.

But still, bash is the best compromise if you want to run the same shell in the terminal and on scripts. zsh is great for interactive mode, but I heard it is not so great for scripts. On the other hand, ksh is a good shell for scripts and way faster than bash, and has some nice features like floating point arithmetic that bash has not, but I tried setting it up for interactive use, and I found it to be really bad!

#!/bin/bash

Eh?

I started doing all my Slackware shell-scripting in zsh last year.

I read that on Stack Exchange: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...ux/28813#28813 It seems to have improved a bit over the years, though.

I found a few minor annoyances while trying to convert a bash script to zsh, like for example `[[ $var ]]` doesn't work, I had to use `[[ -n $var ]]` instead.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I love BASH for scripting. It has functions, arrays, traps, and all the other goodies I need to duct-tape stuff together and make my computer do unusual things without too much fuss. Escaping is a pain in the rear, but I suspect it's that way for all scripting languages...mostly because "regular" expressions don't have a particularly uniform syntax across external commands, and every external command has its own variety of syntax quirks (sed, awk, grep: I'm looking at you).

I sometimes wonder if some of the complaints about bash come as a result of it not being like whatever programming/scripting language people have spent a lot of time studying in college (or at home), or because it takes quite a lot of time to learn everything BASH can do.

I use the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide, every time I script in BASH, and always learn something new and interesting.

Oh, and it can be used as a command-line interpreter, too. ;-)

bash does all that I need and does it well...

ksh - but I am "old school" I suppose. And I like "vi" mode - having used vi as my editor since 1980 (or was it 79 when I stopped using /bin/ed :P)

Bash with fortunes.

Bash, it's the standard and has everything I need. I've never been a big fan of Zsh, I find it somewhat quirky.

bash for scripting
zsh for interactive

Still bash