For scripting, most recommend Bourne-compatible, which includes BASH, ZSH, DASH, and [PD]KSH. In my experience, when you stick with a certain subset of what these all do you'll be "safe" and your scripts will not break if/when you carry them around. I have tried to distill some of the lessons learned in recent years into a "best practice" doc.

https://github.com/trothr/best/blob/main/Shell.md

We talked briefly here about profiling. Easiest way to have consistent profiling is to *not* use the shell-specific variants. (For example, if your login shell is BASH, then use ~/.profile and avoid ~/.bash_profile.)
I really need to add this info to that page.

Some people like CSH for interactive work, for which there is TCSH in open source land. But CSH variants are *not* recommended for scripting.

Coming to closure, I have recently built the following for the Chicory project:

 * bash-5.2.21
 * zsh-5.9
 * dash-0.5.12
 * pdksh-5.2.14
 * tcsh-6.24.10


I don't have access to a USS environment which I'm free to use for public things, so I don't have any of these built for MVS. The platforms I *do* have include: Linux-i386, Linux-x86_64, Linux-s390, Linux-s390x, Linux-arm, FreeBSD-amd64, SunOS-i386, SunOS-x86_64. You can find most of them under rsync://chic.casita.net/opt. (If they're not there now, they should be in the next 24 hours.)

I hope this helps.

-- R; <><


On 2/19/24 14:31, Pew, Curtis G wrote:
On Feb 17, 2024, at 11:00 AM, Paul 
Gilmartin<0000042bfe9c879d-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu>  wrote:

What are the benefits of zsh?  Are there incompatibilities?

I largely stay with POSIX shell for portability of scripts and skills.

Apple switched to zsh because newer versions of bash are covered by the GPLv3 
license, which is less corporate-friendly than the older GPLv2. I would assume 
that IBM has similar motivation.

If you’re still seeing bash on a Mac that probably means you started using it 
before the switch. It’s been a while, but when they switched the default I had 
to do something (probably in Terminal) to get it to switch for me. (It used to 
prompt you to switch if you opened with a bash shell.) There’s still bash 
available on MacOS, but it’s a rather old version, 3.2.57 while the current 
stable release is 5.2.21.


--
Curtis Pew
ITS Campus Solutions
curtis....@austin.utexas.edu




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