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I'm curious about the popularity of Bash vis a vis, say, Csh. Is Bash more popular due to superior features, or is simply because it is the default on quite a f
by santaclaus 10y ago
I'm curious about the popularity of Bash vis a vis, say, Csh. Is Bash more popular due to superior features, or is simply because it is the default on quite a few *nix distros (and macOS)?
- pmoriarty 10y agoI used to use zsh way back in the day because it was clearly superior to bash, then decades ago switched to bash because it was everywhere by default and my job involved using lots of computers that only had bash on them, then about 4 or 5 years ago I switched back to zsh because I realized that it really didn't matter that I used zsh on my own machine and bash on others, and zsh was still better than bash. These days bash seems to have a lot closer feature parity to zsh, and I'd be curious to read an up-to-date comparison of both shells to determine if either is clearly better than the other.
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 10y agoshell is a bit like JavaScript: both languages have a lot of warts, but if you interact with UNIX-like systems / browsers at intermediate or above levels, you must be comfortable with them. Unlike browsers, you have a few choices for shells, and IMHO [t]csh lost because a) Linux "won" over *BSDs, b) POSIX basically standardized on sh, c) [t]csh is a worse scripting language. Back in uni I used to use tcsh interactively, script in [ba]sh, and program in a "real language" like C, Java, etc., but I wasn't doing anything very complicated with any of them. Once I started working and begin using these tools seriously, I simply couldn't learn and retain all of them. Something had to go, and tcsh was it.