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> When people refer to the entire suite of Unix-like tools as “bash” I don’t quite know what to make of it. Because nobody installs bash without coreutils and

> When people refer to the entire suite of Unix-like tools as “bash” I don’t quite know what to make of it. Because nobody installs bash without coreutils and the 30 or so other common utility programs (grep, sed, awk, et al). Pointing out that bash doesn't include coreutils+standard is just being pedantic. Nobody runs a system without those utilities present. Everybody already knows what is meant. You're not adding to the meaning by requiring a comprehensive listing of core and standard utility programs. You might as well be saying, "Actually, it's not Linux. It's GNU/Linux." Only Richard Stallman cares, but even Stallman recognizes that because "a long name such as GNU/X11/Apache/Linux/TeX/Perl/Python/FreeCiv becomes absurd, at some point you will have to set a threshold and omit the names of the many other secondary contributions." [0] Nobody is going to say, "OMG, how can you say you have a proper environment if you don't mention that you have the very important yes utility." Nobody is really interested in a required-only install of Debian or a base-only install of Red Hat or whatever because the use case for that is so rare and narrow that it's not worth contextualizing. Anybody who is doing that knows that it's a weird setup. [0]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#many https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#many

umanwizard 7y ago
You seem to be responding to points that I’m not making. I’m aware that very few people install bash outside the context of a typical Unix OS. It would indeed be pedantic and useless to point out that that’s theoretically possible, and that’s not what I’m doing. It’s also very rare to install, say, grep outside of a typical Unix OS. But you wouldn’t say “the grep workflow on WSL is great” to mean the entire WSL experience, unless you were specifically talking about actual grep. So why do people do it with bash?
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Because bash is the name of the Unix shell, differentiated from the traditional Windows shell.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    Would you say “I’m using Chrome and Visual Studio” or “I’m using a Windows workflow and tools” or “I’m using explorer.exe” ? The first two make much more sense to me than the third. (As an aside, it’s not true that Bash is “the Unix shell” and it is in fact not the default on several Unix-like systems. But in fairness to your point, it is the default on most GNU/Linux distros).

umanwizard 7y ago

You seem to be responding to points that I’m not making. I’m aware that very few people install bash outside the context of a typical Unix OS. It would indeed be pedantic and useless to point out that that’s theoretically possible, and that’s not what I’m doing. It’s also very rare to install, say, grep outside of a typical Unix OS. But you wouldn’t say “the grep workflow on WSL is great” to mean the entire WSL experience, unless you were specifically talking about actual grep. So why do people do it with bash?

lonelappde 7y ago
Because bash is the name of the Unix shell, differentiated from the traditional Windows shell.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  Would you say “I’m using Chrome and Visual Studio” or “I’m using a Windows workflow and tools” or “I’m using explorer.exe” ? The first two make much more sense to me than the third. (As an aside, it’s not true that Bash is “the Unix shell” and it is in fact not the default on several Unix-like systems. But in fairness to your point, it is the default on most GNU/Linux distros).