What Linux shell should I use? [closed]

Answer 1

For interactivity, use Zsh. For a while I was the maintainer of the FreeBSD port of the Bash tab-completion scripts, but abandoned it as soon as I tried Zsh for the first time. It can do everything Bash can do but more easily and more elegantly. It also has the nice property of having extremely Bash-like keystrokes, so if you're on a system without Zsh, you'll be able to make do (even if it wouldn't "feel" as nice).

For scripting, use Bourne Shell (sh). It's the POSIX standard scripting language and your scripts are pretty much guaranteed to work everywhere. Bash and Zsh and other shells have nice extensions that you'll miss but those tie you to a specific setup. Ignore that advice for personal-use-only scripts that you're certain you'll never run elsewhere, but remember that it's a real tradeoff that you need to consider.

But in summary, Zsh. I don't know of anyone who's tried it who didn't immediately and permanently switch. It really is that good.

Answer 2

I use pdksh all the time without having anything close to perfect typing (perhaps you need to fix your termcap?).

ksh is the standard, csh is a standard and bash is 'standard', but on linux only. Better to target ksh.

Answer 3

Since I believe I'm the person who suggested that you should use something other than C Shell, perhaps I should should qualify my remarks slightly, and then support those who said 'bash on Linux, Korn shell on other platforms (unless bash is installed there too)'.

Rather like editors (do you prefer vim or emacs), choice of shell is partly a question of familiarity and partly a question of preference. There are many who like C shell, though I do believe that it is less easily programmable than Bourne shell and derivatives. What I have in my .cshrc is, indeed, equivalent to exec /bin/ksh (it isn't identically that because I want to execute a login shell - one that reads the profile and so on), but I wouldn't condemn anyone for using C shell or a derivative if it is an informed decision.

If you decide that you want to use something other than C shell, then you are basically in the Bourne shell camp, for which the POSIX standard more or less specifies the expected behaviour and then the different shells -- that is, the Bourne, Korn or Born Again shells -- add (or, in the case of the classic Bourne shell, subtract) a few features. If your code might ever need to move off Linux to HP-UX, Solaris or AIX (the surviving trio of the classic, AT&T-derived Unix variants), then you should consider ensuring you write your shell scripts in classic Bourne shell, though Korn shell is also pretty safe. Note, though, that on Linux you can write #!/bin/sh and get Bash, on the other platforms, you will get Bourne shell.

I switch between Korn shell and Bash without major problems - and seldom with minor problems. I tend to stay clear of those corners of either language that are not well defined - which tends to mean 'defined in both'. Another problem for those using Linux is that the GNU tools have more options than the classic Unix versions, and you can lose portability not because of the shell programming constructs that you use but because of the command options you use. Experience and ready access to the manual pages of other systems helps enormously.

Answer 4

I'm not big Ruby user but http://rush.heroku.com/ looks interesting

Answer 5

It's probably best to stick with bash simply because it's the most widely used as a shell and any tutorials or help you may receive from someone will most likely use bash. However, I have started using zsh for all of my scripts and I have found it to be far superior to bash in terms of scripting.

Answer 6

I usually stick to bash, because it's more friendly than straight-up sh, and it's the default on every distro I've used semi-regularly (SuSE, RHEL, Ubuntu, Slackware).

If you're planning to write portable shell scripts, however, make sure they all run in real sh.