Adam Shand wrote: > > > <PERSONAL_BIAS> > > Use bash (instead of tcsh) and ssh (for connecting to remote hosts). > > </PERSONAL_BIAS> > > running a couple of days behind here but ... > > are there reasons for your personal bias? i definately agree with using > ssh for connecting to hosts (auto setting of display variable, encryption, > encrypted tunnelling of x sessions, rsa authentications etc etc). > > is is there really any advantage to using bash over tcsh? > > i use tcsh because it's what i learned first and now it's familiar... but > i've been looking for a reason to be bothered swapping over to bash. > > can you convince me? :) >
How 'bout I just tell you why I prefer bash these days. (I'm not interested in starting or participating in a "religious war" :) I (only recently) have started to prefer bash over tcsh for two main reasons: 1) I find myself working on several different OSs these days: WinNT, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, FreeBSD, Linux, etc. Being able to have the same shell everywhere is nice and I have found bash to be the easiest to install on all these types of machines. (autoconf is a beautiful thing!) 2) Bash is Bourne Shell compatible. This means that if I'm in a situation where I cannot install bash, for whatever reason, I'm not strangled by being unfamiliar with sh-flavor command line behavior. (I've found that an unconfigured csh is about as friendly as unconfigured ksh - both of which are found standard on most machines, whereas bash and tcsh are usually only installed by people like me.) This point is even stronger for scripts. Very few scripts I find are written in csh, so being familiar with Bourne syntax is more productive. (csh is supposed to be more "C-like" in it's syntax - I find this very deceptive. csh is about as C-like as French is English-like. Yes, there are similarities but they are very different languages. With bash around making sh as user-friendly as tcsh, I might as well forget csh and learn sh. (This is similar to why I think Java/C can now replace C++, but I digress. :)) Of course this topic cannot be mentioned without the following reference: http://language.perl.com/versus/csh.whynot While there are still a few things I prefer about tcsh, I figure bash can probably to it all, I just need to figure it out... Reading the rest of this thread just might be what I need! Regards, Keith ps - for those unfamiliar with the history of Unix shells: sh = Bourne Shell csh = C Shell (not sh compatible, a C-like shell) ksh = Kron Shell (an extension of sh) tcsh = Tenex(?) C shell (an extension of csh) bash = Bourne Again Shell (a sh compatible extension of sh with ksh, csh and tcsh functionality influence) LocalWords: Kron -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
