What Linux shell should I use? [closed]

Answer 1

Nobody mentioned the Debian based standard for sh, Its the Debian Almquist shell dash. Its is fully POSIX compliant and has a very fast startup, which is why Debian/Ubuntu use it for /bin/sh.

So I use bash for my interactive shell, but only dash for scripting. That way i know my scripts are at least POSIX compliant, and will run on any other POSIX shell. ... I know portability is more than the shell, but its where I draw the line.

Answer 2

I like ksh actually. It's a bit more consistent than bash because it does not try to support any csh constructs. tcsh, in my experience, is least compatible with other shells, and I avoid it. I try to write scripts to sh, but ksh does have some nice features like exporting and setting a variable on one line. I try to preserve compatibility with bash as well, since it is full-featured and common. To write portable shell scripts, which is more important than selecting the "best" shell, you might consult this book.

Portable Shell Programming: An Extensive Collection of Bourne Shell Examples (HP Professional Series) by Bruce Blinn (Paperback - Oct 29, 1995) amazon.com

Answer 3

I think FISH is the best, is has syntax highlighting(for commands that don't exists) and it can autofill. And it is very easy to learn.

Answer 4

Fish (Friendly Interactive Shell) is a nice alternative to most of the other shells. It has a consistent syntax, nice tab completion and syntax highlighting, is easy to pickup and use (especially if you don't have habits from other shells), and has excellent runtime help.

Downside is that it's erratically developed, has a small (but helpful) user base, and is very different than other shells. Backwards compatibility with shell idioms was not a priority.

In many cases this is good... a lot of the standard shells have really stupid ways of doing things, just because it's always been done that way. "do/done", "case/esac", "if/fi"? This is insanity that fish does away with.

It's worth a look.

Answer 5

I prefer zsh.

The tab-completion alone is worth it:

• It expands wildcards if you want(handy when you want to delete all but one file in a directory)
• Will give you a list of switches after specifying a program
• Gives tab completion options below the line you're working on, which is pretty handy.

http://zsh.sourceforge.net/

Answer 6

The problem with csh is that it's crap for scripting, as explained here. There's no real reason why you shouldn't use it as an interactive shell, but most people find it confusing having to learn two different shells and not being able to try out bits of their scripts on the command line, so it's easiest to use the same for everything.

The obvious candidates for an interactive shell are bash, dash, zsh and {pd,}ksh. All of these implement the posix shell standard, with some minor extensions. Pick whichever you like for interactive use, I'd tend to go with bash just because it's the standard on linux but they all have their merits and zsh in particular seems popular.

If you're writing a script that you intend to be portable, use #!/bin/sh, and make sure you use standard posix shell syntax. If it works on both bash and ksh it's probably standard. There are some old versions of unix which have a non-standard /bin/sh but I wouldn't bother with that unless you know you have to. More of a problem for portability are all the command line tools you call from your script.