Slashdot Mirror
Apple Switches tcsh for bash
gklinger writes "AppleInsider is reporting that Apple has switched from tcsh to bash in the the latest developer build (7B44) of Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). There is speculation that the switch was made to appeal to Linux users. Experienced users get pretty religious about their shells so what remains to be seen is how diehard tcsh users will react." I don't know about appealing to Linux users in particular, but I just don't know many people who prefers tcsh these days, on any platform. It seems like everyone is using bash or zsh.
also does "ogg vorbis" i predict still more complaining....
Needless to say, pdksh is available for OS X too but you need to download and install it.
It's great. Does exactly what I want out of a shell.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
This move fits with Apple's focus on usability. To be usable, you have to be pronounceable, and you have to be memorable.
bash: nice, violent, memorable name
tcsh: the city in Belorussia?
Its a no-brainer, really.
I for one welcome our new bourne again overlords.
You can get all the software updates from the command line, at least the ones that come through Software Update. The command is "softwareupdate", and needs to be run as root.
you can do updates from the command line...
as for emacs...
I found this:
http://www.porkrind.org/emacs/
In under three seconds. Geez...
And btw, It already is REAL unix, and not only is it the highest volume shipping version of unix on the planet, but apple did what NO other software company has been able to do in the 30+ year history of unix. The made it usable by the masses.
Care to give them at least an ounce of credit now?
Can you not change shells in OSX? If you can_ What's the big deal what the "default" shell is?
If you can't change shells_ then that's just plain weak.
You'll have that sometimes...
I was a big fan of tcsh until I started doing serious shell scripting in
a heterogeneous environment. Since tcsh wasn't available on all machines, all
shell scripts were written for the bourne shell. After several months of
using bourne shell syntax for scripts but using tcsh shell syntax on the
command line, I finally decided that in order to preserve my sanity, I'd try
bash on the command line. Turns out that after a day or so to get used to
things, bash had everything I used tcsh for plus a couple of features that
I'd never known would be so useful.
I don't like running scripts under bash because it's so big, but as an
environment, it's pretty decent.
*sigh* back to work...
With their penchant for user friendliness, I'm surprised they didn't choose mudsh
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
yes you can. Some people just like to complain. It makes them feel better or something...
just install whatever shell they wanted to use anyway? Im sure anyone that has shell scripting in mind also knows how to install their own shell the correctly right?
Chaos is Divine *
I was used to bash as well, and still use it as my default on my work accounts. However, I allowed myself to get used to tcsh, AND Apple's configurations for it (eventually disabled by default in 10.2, I think). Once I got used to how they configured tcsh, I was rather content to use it. When they removed the configurations that made tcsh behave as it did in earlier versions of OS X, I was annoyed, and immediate found out how to turn those back on.
So, as long as they offer an option with some nice configurations with bash, then I'm all for it. And I DON'T want to have to configure it myself. I simply don't have the time or patience. IF tcsh actually goes away, they better port the enhancements to bash... that's all I gotta say.
-Alex
If you're writing non-trivial scripts, you would do far better to use a decent scripting language like Ruby, Perl or Python, all of which are more portable than bash, not to mention more robust and less likely to result in scripts filled with security holes.
The bash shell is really the tool of choice for people who can only deal with one tool. For interactive use, tcsh is better, and for scripting almost anything is better.
Basically, bash tries to be jack-of-all-trades, with all that that implies. But to FSF folks, who use emacs, "jack of all trades" is a way of life.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
count me in for long-time tcsh users.
It's not that I'm die-hard fanatic over it, but when I started using Unix there was only tcsh as a comfort shell, no bash. And why switch when tcsh works well.
- Hubert
tcsh works perfectly well as an interactive shell. It has some severe problems when it comes to scripting, so I do my scripting in portable bourne shell.. but tcsh is perfectly functional as an interactive shell. I use it under linux, solaris, aix, hpux, and cygwin without issue.
That said, I'm not surprised that apple change to a bourne-compatible shell. Bourne has been the unix standard for a long time, so changing to this makes sense. It means that all of the unix examples out there will work out of the box and not have to be translated into csh syntax. This is probably a good thing. People can still exec tcsh if they like.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
from shell (or just find the double clickable icon):
/Applications/Utilities/NetInfo\ Manager.app
open
now navigate to users->$userWhosShellYouWantToChange
find the key named....(this is a tough one) "shell" and then just put the shell you want...bash....whatever...
Tom Christiansen's article is explaining why csh shouldn't be used for PROGRAMMING.
Nobody's suggesting that tsch be used for programming. Least of all Apple, who don't provide any kind of development documentation for it beyond the man page. Scripting on the Mac is best done in AppleScript. Scripting on UNIX is best done with Python, Perl or Ruby.
You can run any shell's scripts from your choice of shell, and anyone writing shell scripts more than a couple of dozen lines long ought to be taken out and shot anyway, so there's absolutely no reason to pick your interactive shell based on its scripting capabilities. That's like picking your web browser based on how well it does "display source of page".
Fact is, tcsh is a better interactive shell than bash for newbies, thanks to intelligent command completion. (No, I don't mean the "complete the program name" stuff bash has, I mean the way tcsh knows about common arguments and options of the most-used programs, and can fill those in for you as well.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty
This will not happen. sendmail is written by Kirk McKusick's partner, Eric Allman, and Apple are still trying very very VERY hard to recruit Kirk to help with speed and more robust POSIX compliance. Pitching Kirk's life partner's work would not be a convincing way of showing Kirk much they want him on board.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
What's so great about bash and/or zsh? Now that I've gotten used to tcsh I'm not sure why it should change. They all seem pretty much the same to me, except the do the same things in slightly different ways.
If you ask me, the default shell should be whichever one with a history that loads the fastest. Many os x users only use terminal.app for the occasional foray into command-line-only commands (like me). Waiting for your shell to load are precious seconds wasted.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
tcsh is a tad easier to work with. yes its less powerful but most of the time i dont need the power and would gladly trade for the simpler syntax and even more gladly trade uniformity for customization.
it seem to me that making the default shell tcsh and letting power users change it to bash if they want might bave been a better alternative. also considering that all my scripts will now break under the defaults its not so good for me.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
For a moment there, I thought the headline read: Apple Switches THC for hash...
But I like working in tcsh!
This is a wonderful feature, especially when working on a case-preserving-yet-insensitive filesystem like HFS+.
This one doesn't always save me -- one of my common typos is to repeat the 'd' when changing directory, thus:
But it's enough of a win that I wouldn't want to go back to an interactive shell that doesn't have such a feature.
Whenever I'm trying to do anything complex, I tend to drop into a bash subshell, but for 90% of interactive work I find that tcsh can do about everything bash can, and has a lot of interesting enhancements that AFAIK bash doesn't. Please feel free to correct me if that's not true, and bash can now do such things.
(Also, another nice thing about being comfortable in an alternative shell, aside from being able to work productively when dropped on a machine that maybe doesn't have a wide variety of shells, is the built in security factor. It has been long observed that using an unusual keyboard or pointing device is an excellent (if mild) way to discourage people from messing around with your computer when you're away from your desk. Using an unusual command shell can have the same mild deterrance effect: it may not keep your Linux-loving neighbor from messing around in a login session you forgot to close, but it might annoy him enough to get it to get bored & go away pretty quickly :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
bash-2.04$ chsh
Come again?
Funny troll, but emacs is part of the default install.
Caveat: it's possible that emacs is part of the developer's tools rather than a base OSX installation. I don't think that matters though: if you're looking for a "real Unix", then you're going to want a C compiler and all the rest anyway, so you're going to check off the button for "install BSD subsystem" at system install time and you're going to install the developer's tools immediately after you first log in to the system. So whether Emacs was available 0 minutes or 2 minutes after the first login, I still would call that part of a complete operating system, and saying that it's not available is just trolling.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I imagine it will go something along the lines of...
user@mac:~$ tcsh
mac:~>
Not to nitpick, but one can run softwareupdate as nonroot in order to check for updates, then sudoing it for the actual install.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Came with the system. I'm in process of setting up a brand new laptop with OS X 10.2.6, and emacs is there. I haven't even installed Developer Tools as of yet, which is where it was before. So sometime, probably in some update from 10.2.3 to 10.2.6 emacs was added to the basic OS.
This is a mild gripe, but I'd like to see a version of "ps" that follows the Linux conventions for arguments. I work with three *nix operating systems: OS X, Linux, and HP-UX. The arguments are mostly the same between Linux and HP-UX, e.g. "ps -ef" for a listing of all processes. I invariably try typing that same command in OS X, only to remember, after being told that the arguments are invalid, that the equivalent command is "ps -ax". Annoying!
This isn't well known, and for those who aren't hopelessly devoted to their shell, it's a good reason to use tcsh on Mac OS X. Fred Sanchez maintains a nice set of tcsh configuration files that are installed, but not loaded, by default. For more information, see the file located at:
/usr/share/tcsh/examples/README
If you're a new tcsh user, setting this up is as simple as echoing a few files into your home directory. If you've already got a tcsh configuration, it shouldn't be too hard to shift things around. When all is done, you'll have a great set of default command completions and aliases, and a cool way to organize your customizations.
"It's the same mentality that's behind different Islamic sects hating each other even more than they hate Christians."
Really? How exactly does a default shell in an OS relate to that again?
Plus if bash comes with it and all you have to do is change default shells, what's the big deal?
You'll have that sometimes...
I followed the link provided, and found the section titled "Unix-lover Heaven" rather funny. It said, "Panther will include a final X11 window server for Unix-based apps, improved NFS/UFS, FreeBSD 5 innovations as well as support for popular Linux APIs, IPv6 and other important acronyms." I'm guessing the marketing folks wrote that last bit...
emacs sheemacs, it comes with vi, and that's all that matters
:wq
Anyway, Apple has enough problems with OS X being RAM-hungry, without enticing people to fill 80MB with a text editor.
Agreed, using emacs for a simple text editor is like using MS Office as a simple text editor.. Except MS Office is smaller.
...to the term mac bash-ing.
...or bourne again mac user.
bash is GPL and zsh is Berkeley, Apple seemed to be afraid of GPL at the beginning and has taken a more practical stance more recently...
You can just update your account to use whatever shell you want anyway. I see both bash and tcsh on my MacOS X 10.2 install, so there should be no trouble for someone who cares enough to change shells.
It is a moot point.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/