What Linux shell should I use? [closed]

Answer 1

The most common shell, by far, on Linux is bash. Unless you have a good reason to use an alternative, I'd suggest that sticking with bash, or the most commonly used shell by your project team (or that the bulk of the shell scripts you have to work with) uses.

The only other very common contender is dash, which is becoming more widely used by the Ubuntu project.

This really is personal preference, well, except for csh.

Wikipedia link for csh

Answer 2

Bash. It's standard.

Answer 3

I came also from csh, tcsh to bash. It's different but after some time, at least as nice as the c-shells.

For Scripting I would recommand ksh, because it's available on most Unixes (Solaris, HP-UX , OSF/1 (The best UNIX ever ;) - for it's time)) and it has good features. With Korn you can programm most of the scripts. Sporadicaly you would like to get more then a number, as return value from a function, or you have some data that you can not put in a simple array, or you need something that has better capabilities in case of regegs, or what ever, then I would propose perl.

Answer 4

For writing actual scripts, I prefer ksh, which has several extensions useful for programming and fixes one of my pet annoyances.

bash is my preference for interactive sessions, but that is more a matter of personal preference than anything else. Just be sure it is a Bourne-type shell.

Answer 5

For scripting, try using dash for a while to get a good feel for what is portable. If you ever use bash to write a shell script, please explicitly declare bash in the scripts shebang.

For your personal console use, experiment with what is out there. Find something that you're comfortable with. Be eccentric and annoy all your sysadmin friends by picking up a shell that has to be compiled from source for every machine you care to use it on.

Answer 6

Select one: a. tcsh b. ksh c. zsh d. login e. bash

I would use login. Just sayin.