18 ms·

> Use bash. Using zsh or fish or any other, will make it hard for others to understand / collaborate. Among all shells, bash strikes a good balance between port

> Use bash. Using zsh or fish or any other, will make it hard for others to understand / collaborate. Among all shells, bash strikes a good balance between portability and DX. I think fish is quite a bit different in terms of syntax and semantics (I'm not very familiar with it), but zsh is essentially the same as bash except without most of the needless footguns and awkwardness. zsh also has many more advanced features, which you don't need to use (and many people are unaware of them anyway), but will very quickly become useful; in bash all sorts of things require obscure incantations and/or shell pipelines that almost make APL seem obvious in comparison. In my experience few people understand bash (or POSIX sh) in the first place, partly because everything is so difficult and full of caveats. Half my professional shell scripting experience on the job is fixing other people's scripts. So might as well use something that doesn't accidentally introduce bugs every other line. Most – though obviously far from all – scripts tend to be run in environments you control; portability is often overrated and not all that important (except when it is of course). Once upon a time I insisted on POSIX sh, and then I realised that actually, >90% of the scripts I wrote were run just by me or run only in an environment otherwise under my control, and that it made no sense. I still use POSIX sh for some public things I write, when it makes sense, but that's fairly rare. I think bash is really standing in the way of progress, whether that progress is in the form of fish, zsh, oil shell, or something else, because so many people conflate "shell" with "bash", similar to how people conflate "Google" with "search" or "git" with "GitHub" (to some degree).

pizza234 4y ago
I don't know fish, but I don't consider zsh a step in the right direction, as it tries to be just a cleaned up Bash, which is not enough. There is a general problem in the fact that a radical evolution of glue languages wouldn't be popular because devs rather use Python, and small evolutions wouldn't be popular (ie. zsh), because they end up being confusing (since they're still close to Bash) and not bringing significant advantages. I'm curious why there haven't been attempts to write a modern glue language (mind that languages like Python don't fit this class). I guess that Powershell (which I don't know, though) has been the only attempt.
- rscho 4y ago
  Oilshell is attempting new stuff, though.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  zsh is not a "cleaned-up bash"; it's more of a clone of ksh (closed source at the time), with some csh features added in, as well as their own inventions. bash and zsh appeared at roughly the same time, many features were added in zsh first and added to bash later (sometimes much later, and often never). This is kind of a good example of what I meant when people conflate "bash" with "shell". As for your larger point: I kind of agree, but I think what zsh offers is the advantages of shell scripts with compatibility with existing scripts while still improving on it. That said, I believe oil also offers compatibility, but I haven't had the chance to look deeply in to it; just haven't had the time, and wanted to wait until it's stable (maybe it is now?) Perl was initially invented as the "modern glue language" to replace shell. It's fallen a bit out of fashion these days though, and to be honest I never cared all that much for Perl myself either. Raku looks nice though. TCL also works well as a kind of "glue language", although it has some really odd behaviour at times due to everything being a string and I know some people hate it with a passion, but it always worked fairly well for me. But that has also fallen out of fashion. I've also been told PowerShell is actually quite nice and has interesting concepts (and now also open source, and you can run it on e.g. Linux), but I could never get over the verbosity of it all. I'm an old unix greybeard and I want my obscure abbreviations dammit!
  - shifto 4y ago
    Just so you know. You can abbreviate almost anything in powershell or make your won aliases. I love Powershell, hands down best investment in my personal career was to really learn and understand Powershell.
  - papascrubs 4y ago
    The verbosity of PowerShell is overstated I think. You easily make POSH look as gnarly and esoteric as Bash if you so desire. That said, the majority of heavy lifting in POSH is done via methods these days (vs cmdlets). Your initial API query to snag the JSON might be via a cmdlet, but after that, you're slicing and dicing with real data structures. You can interact with them without having worry about whitespace or structure (meaning complex loops can easily be written on the command line without worrying about indentation). It's a little more wordy if you're use to C or Bash. But hands down it's one of my favorite languages for slicing dicing data. No need for 3rd party libraries or binaries. No need to learn a bunch of weird awk/jq syntax which is only useful for those two tools (yay, lets learn 3 language instead one?). Plus, most of the structure translates over to C#, and you can integrate C# code directly into your POSH code if desired, as well as access pretty much any low level C# methods directly. Working with strings? Pretty much any/every tool you could want to slice and dice strings. The POSH REPL is amazing. You have far more flexibility around interacting with the command line than you do with Python. It's both a shell and a true language. As with any language, there are ISMs, but far fewer footguns than any other language I've spun up. Cross platform as well with 6.0+ Intellisense ON the commandline (did I mention the awesome REPL?). Hands down one of the best built-in parameter/args/help parsing I've encountered across any language. Debugging? Amazing in vscode. And can be done strictly from the commandline as well (dynamic breakpoints? You've got it, drop you right into your catch block with an interactive shell so you can see the current status of any/all variables and manipulate them live and resume if desired) Okay, I'm done shilling for POSH. It's hands down one of my favorite shells/languages for doing POC work, or writing utility functions. Treat it more like Python than bash. But realize that you can easily use that Pythonic-esque code right inside your shell.
benreesman 4y ago
A little personal color: I’m kind of a terminal tweak-fanatic but I’ve stuck with bash. Ten years or so ago the cool kids were using zsh: which is in general a pretty reasonable move, it’s got way more command-line amenities than bash (at least built in). Today fish is the fucking business: fish is so much more fun as a CLI freak. But I guess I’ve got enough PTSD around when k8s or it’s proprietary equivalents get stuck that I always wanted to be not only functional but fast in outage-type scenarios that I kept bash as a daily driver. Writing shell scripts of any kind is godawful, the equivalent python is the code you want to own, but it’s universality is a real selling point, like why I keep half an eye on Perl5 even though I loathe it: it may suck but it’s always there when the klaxon is going off. The best possible software is useless if it’s not installed.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  I personally really dislike fish as an interactive shell as it's just so busy. Things keep popping up, everything is in so many different colours, etc. It's great if you like that sort of stuff, but I really appreciate a "quiet" environment. This is also why I use Vim: all the IDEs I tried are just so "busy". I was only talking about scripting; I know fish scripting is different, but I have no idea if it's any good. For interactive shells I don't care what people use: it's 100% a personal choice.
  - monknomo 4y ago
    if you want `fish_config` opens up an easy editor for changing all the colors to whatever you find quiet and soothing. You have a level of control over things popping up too
    - Beltalowda 4y ago
      Quite a few things can't be disabled; for example AFAIK it doesn't offer a way to disable the autocomplete altogether, or the "fuzzy" matching. I really dislike these things. Fish is a great shell, but very opinionated which is great if your preferences align with that, and not-so-great if they don't. Which is fine because it makes the project better for those who do want these things, and not every project needs to cater to everyone.
imgabe 4y ago
Is there any way to get MacOS to stop nagging you about zsh?
- jomar 4y ago
  Export $BASH_SILENCE_DEPRECATION_WARNING as described in the Apple web page pointed to by the nag message, or change your shell to your own version of Bash. See also <https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/371997/suppressing-the-default-interactive-shell-is-now-zsh-message-in-macos-catalina https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/371997/suppressing...>. I went with the "use an updated brewed Bash" approach, which has been working well. Using `sudo chfn` means you don't need to futz around with editing /etc/shells.
  - imgabe 4y ago
    ah, that is lovely. Thank you.
leni536 4y ago
If I had the choice of using zsh, then most likely I would had the choice to use python.
IYasha 4y ago
As much as I love ZSH in my daily life, in sripting I HATE it for not having the "==" operator! >:((
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  It works inside [[ ]], just not in [ ]. =name will expand to the entry in your PATH. e.g. =ls expands to /usr/bin/ls. So == expands to an executable named =, or rather, it tries to as you probably don't have = in your PATH. [[ ]] disables expansions (e.g. [[ * = * ]] will work too) so it's not an issue there.
HyperSane 4y ago
sh and bash feel pretty primitive after learning PowerShell.
- majkinetor 4y ago
  They don't feel primitive, they are primitive.
  - l3uwin 4y ago
    Yep, just as a screwdriver is. For certain jobs, that's all you need.
    - majkinetor 4y ago
      Indeed, except then you have to maintain screwdriver.
  - lupire 4y ago
    I prefer "primal" for old great things.
- orwin 4y ago
  I feel like powershell hides too much to be used regularly. I have a dozen of small shellscripts and aliases to do basically what PS help me to do when i work on windows (and some), but at least i know how it work behind. I had to work with Sencha/ExtJS early 2010. It was the same feeling. Yes, it is powerfull, but too much magic happen for something without a clear orientation (at the time, now it is used for data loaded frontend i think). PS i don't understand what it wants me to do. The language is fine. The interface is now fine, but in 2015 it was the shittiest tty available on modern computers. It's okay since at least early 2021 (when i restarted using windows). I know it should be reasonably better, but i wouldn't trust any PS script written before 2021 to run on my workstation. I run bash scripts i wrote when i started coding. Still, if you're new to the gig and don't care about free software and commons, you should learn PS (unless you want to work on baremetal or on MC, in this case, bash will be enough).
aasasd 4y ago
I think the article means using Bash for scripting, while the reader could use anything they want interactively. That's what I do—I use zsh, but I don't script in zsh.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  Yes, I was talking about scripting. I don't care what people use for their interactive shell: that's their own personal choice.
lloydatkinson 4y ago
First time I’ve ever seen “good DX” as one of bash’s selling points.
hiepph 4y ago
I can't really stand Bash's arcane syntax, it drains my brain power (and time of consulting manual) every time I have to work with it. Switching to Fish has been a breath of fresh air for me. I think some people who want to use only Bash need to open their conservative mind. All of my personal shell scripts now are converted to Fish. If I want to run some POSIX-compatible script then I just use `bash scripts.sh` Of course Bash is ubiquitous so I use them whenever I can in the company. A golden rule for me is: if it has more than 50 lines then I should probably write in a decent programming language (e.g. Ruby). It makes maintenance so much easier.
- coliveira 4y ago
  This battle was lost a long time ago. Bash is the standard on most UNIX systems. If you change this reality, one might even start to try to think about writing in fish or some other new shell. But I will not even consider another shell for scripts that need to be run by other people.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - blueflow 4y ago
    POSIX shell is the standard, not bash.
    - chubot 4y ago
      That ship has sailed, because busybox ash and dash continually implement some of bash features and semantics, which come from ksh. And OSH implements almost all of bash That is, The posix shell spec is missing a lot of reality. It’s not very actively maintained, unfortunately The canonical example is not having local vars, which basically every shell supports
      - blueflow 4y ago
        "Everybody using some extensions" is not a contradiction to "The standard is the baseline". > It’s not very actively maintained, unfortunately Because that's how standards works. If there is enough interest a new standard will be made, but right now, bash isn't it.
jd3 4y ago
I just use whatever the default is, and since that's zsh on macOS now, I just ported my ~/.profile to be functionally interchangeable between zsh and bash Same PS1, aliases, functions, etc. but with a couple of slight variations due to syntax differences
- lupire 4y ago
  There is no default scripting language, though.
ilyt 4y ago
> Most – though obviously far from all – scripts tend to be run in environments you control; portability is often overrated and not all that important (except when it is of course) If you're at that spot, don't use shell in the first place but whatever other scripting language your team uses. Well, unless it's "pipe this to that to that", sh has no parallel here

pizza234 4y ago

I don't know fish, but I don't consider zsh a step in the right direction, as it tries to be just a cleaned up Bash, which is not enough. There is a general problem in the fact that a radical evolution of glue languages wouldn't be popular because devs rather use Python, and small evolutions wouldn't be popular (ie. zsh), because they end up being confusing (since they're still close to Bash) and not bringing significant advantages. I'm curious why there haven't been attempts to write a modern glue language (mind that languages like Python don't fit this class). I guess that Powershell (which I don't know, though) has been the only attempt.

rscho 4y ago
Oilshell is attempting new stuff, though.
Beltalowda 4y ago
zsh is not a "cleaned-up bash"; it's more of a clone of ksh (closed source at the time), with some csh features added in, as well as their own inventions. bash and zsh appeared at roughly the same time, many features were added in zsh first and added to bash later (sometimes much later, and often never). This is kind of a good example of what I meant when people conflate "bash" with "shell". As for your larger point: I kind of agree, but I think what zsh offers is the advantages of shell scripts with compatibility with existing scripts while still improving on it. That said, I believe oil also offers compatibility, but I haven't had the chance to look deeply in to it; just haven't had the time, and wanted to wait until it's stable (maybe it is now?) Perl was initially invented as the "modern glue language" to replace shell. It's fallen a bit out of fashion these days though, and to be honest I never cared all that much for Perl myself either. Raku looks nice though. TCL also works well as a kind of "glue language", although it has some really odd behaviour at times due to everything being a string and I know some people hate it with a passion, but it always worked fairly well for me. But that has also fallen out of fashion. I've also been told PowerShell is actually quite nice and has interesting concepts (and now also open source, and you can run it on e.g. Linux), but I could never get over the verbosity of it all. I'm an old unix greybeard and I want my obscure abbreviations dammit!
- shifto 4y ago
  Just so you know. You can abbreviate almost anything in powershell or make your won aliases. I love Powershell, hands down best investment in my personal career was to really learn and understand Powershell.
- papascrubs 4y ago
  The verbosity of PowerShell is overstated I think. You easily make POSH look as gnarly and esoteric as Bash if you so desire. That said, the majority of heavy lifting in POSH is done via methods these days (vs cmdlets). Your initial API query to snag the JSON might be via a cmdlet, but after that, you're slicing and dicing with real data structures. You can interact with them without having worry about whitespace or structure (meaning complex loops can easily be written on the command line without worrying about indentation). It's a little more wordy if you're use to C or Bash. But hands down it's one of my favorite languages for slicing dicing data. No need for 3rd party libraries or binaries. No need to learn a bunch of weird awk/jq syntax which is only useful for those two tools (yay, lets learn 3 language instead one?). Plus, most of the structure translates over to C#, and you can integrate C# code directly into your POSH code if desired, as well as access pretty much any low level C# methods directly. Working with strings? Pretty much any/every tool you could want to slice and dice strings. The POSH REPL is amazing. You have far more flexibility around interacting with the command line than you do with Python. It's both a shell and a true language. As with any language, there are ISMs, but far fewer footguns than any other language I've spun up. Cross platform as well with 6.0+ Intellisense ON the commandline (did I mention the awesome REPL?). Hands down one of the best built-in parameter/args/help parsing I've encountered across any language. Debugging? Amazing in vscode. And can be done strictly from the commandline as well (dynamic breakpoints? You've got it, drop you right into your catch block with an interactive shell so you can see the current status of any/all variables and manipulate them live and resume if desired) Okay, I'm done shilling for POSH. It's hands down one of my favorite shells/languages for doing POC work, or writing utility functions. Treat it more like Python than bash. But realize that you can easily use that Pythonic-esque code right inside your shell.

benreesman 4y ago

A little personal color: I’m kind of a terminal tweak-fanatic but I’ve stuck with bash. Ten years or so ago the cool kids were using zsh: which is in general a pretty reasonable move, it’s got way more command-line amenities than bash (at least built in). Today fish is the fucking business: fish is so much more fun as a CLI freak. But I guess I’ve got enough PTSD around when k8s or it’s proprietary equivalents get stuck that I always wanted to be not only functional but fast in outage-type scenarios that I kept bash as a daily driver. Writing shell scripts of any kind is godawful, the equivalent python is the code you want to own, but it’s universality is a real selling point, like why I keep half an eye on Perl5 even though I loathe it: it may suck but it’s always there when the klaxon is going off. The best possible software is useless if it’s not installed.

Beltalowda 4y ago
I personally really dislike fish as an interactive shell as it's just so busy. Things keep popping up, everything is in so many different colours, etc. It's great if you like that sort of stuff, but I really appreciate a "quiet" environment. This is also why I use Vim: all the IDEs I tried are just so "busy". I was only talking about scripting; I know fish scripting is different, but I have no idea if it's any good. For interactive shells I don't care what people use: it's 100% a personal choice.
- monknomo 4y ago
  if you want `fish_config` opens up an easy editor for changing all the colors to whatever you find quiet and soothing. You have a level of control over things popping up too
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    Quite a few things can't be disabled; for example AFAIK it doesn't offer a way to disable the autocomplete altogether, or the "fuzzy" matching. I really dislike these things. Fish is a great shell, but very opinionated which is great if your preferences align with that, and not-so-great if they don't. Which is fine because it makes the project better for those who do want these things, and not every project needs to cater to everyone.

imgabe 4y ago

Is there any way to get MacOS to stop nagging you about zsh?

jomar 4y ago
Export $BASH_SILENCE_DEPRECATION_WARNING as described in the Apple web page pointed to by the nag message, or change your shell to your own version of Bash. See also <https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/371997/suppressing-the-default-interactive-shell-is-now-zsh-message-in-macos-catalina https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/371997/suppressing...>. I went with the "use an updated brewed Bash" approach, which has been working well. Using `sudo chfn` means you don't need to futz around with editing /etc/shells.
- imgabe 4y ago
  ah, that is lovely. Thank you.

leni536 4y ago

If I had the choice of using zsh, then most likely I would had the choice to use python.

IYasha 4y ago

As much as I love ZSH in my daily life, in sripting I HATE it for not having the "==" operator! >:((

Beltalowda 4y ago
It works inside [[ ]], just not in [ ]. =name will expand to the entry in your PATH. e.g. =ls expands to /usr/bin/ls. So == expands to an executable named =, or rather, it tries to as you probably don't have = in your PATH. [[ ]] disables expansions (e.g. [[ * = * ]] will work too) so it's not an issue there.

HyperSane 4y ago

sh and bash feel pretty primitive after learning PowerShell.

majkinetor 4y ago
They don't feel primitive, they are primitive.
- l3uwin 4y ago
  Yep, just as a screwdriver is. For certain jobs, that's all you need.
  - majkinetor 4y ago
    Indeed, except then you have to maintain screwdriver.
- lupire 4y ago
  I prefer "primal" for old great things.
orwin 4y ago
I feel like powershell hides too much to be used regularly. I have a dozen of small shellscripts and aliases to do basically what PS help me to do when i work on windows (and some), but at least i know how it work behind. I had to work with Sencha/ExtJS early 2010. It was the same feeling. Yes, it is powerfull, but too much magic happen for something without a clear orientation (at the time, now it is used for data loaded frontend i think). PS i don't understand what it wants me to do. The language is fine. The interface is now fine, but in 2015 it was the shittiest tty available on modern computers. It's okay since at least early 2021 (when i restarted using windows). I know it should be reasonably better, but i wouldn't trust any PS script written before 2021 to run on my workstation. I run bash scripts i wrote when i started coding. Still, if you're new to the gig and don't care about free software and commons, you should learn PS (unless you want to work on baremetal or on MC, in this case, bash will be enough).

aasasd 4y ago

I think the article means using Bash for scripting, while the reader could use anything they want interactively. That's what I do—I use zsh, but I don't script in zsh.

Beltalowda 4y ago
Yes, I was talking about scripting. I don't care what people use for their interactive shell: that's their own personal choice.

lloydatkinson 4y ago

First time I’ve ever seen “good DX” as one of bash’s selling points.

hiepph 4y ago

I can't really stand Bash's arcane syntax, it drains my brain power (and time of consulting manual) every time I have to work with it. Switching to Fish has been a breath of fresh air for me. I think some people who want to use only Bash need to open their conservative mind. All of my personal shell scripts now are converted to Fish. If I want to run some POSIX-compatible script then I just use `bash scripts.sh` Of course Bash is ubiquitous so I use them whenever I can in the company. A golden rule for me is: if it has more than 50 lines then I should probably write in a decent programming language (e.g. Ruby). It makes maintenance so much easier.

coliveira 4y ago
This battle was lost a long time ago. Bash is the standard on most UNIX systems. If you change this reality, one might even start to try to think about writing in fish or some other new shell. But I will not even consider another shell for scripts that need to be run by other people.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- blueflow 4y ago
  POSIX shell is the standard, not bash.
  - chubot 4y ago
    That ship has sailed, because busybox ash and dash continually implement some of bash features and semantics, which come from ksh. And OSH implements almost all of bash That is, The posix shell spec is missing a lot of reality. It’s not very actively maintained, unfortunately The canonical example is not having local vars, which basically every shell supports
    - blueflow 4y ago
      "Everybody using some extensions" is not a contradiction to "The standard is the baseline". > It’s not very actively maintained, unfortunately Because that's how standards works. If there is enough interest a new standard will be made, but right now, bash isn't it.

jd3 4y ago

I just use whatever the default is, and since that's zsh on macOS now, I just ported my ~/.profile to be functionally interchangeable between zsh and bash Same PS1, aliases, functions, etc. but with a couple of slight variations due to syntax differences

lupire 4y ago
There is no default scripting language, though.

ilyt 4y ago

> Most – though obviously far from all – scripts tend to be run in environments you control; portability is often overrated and not all that important (except when it is of course) If you're at that spot, don't use shell in the first place but whatever other scripting language your team uses. Well, unless it's "pipe this to that to that", sh has no parallel here