Bash 3.0 Released

qazwsx789 writes "The first public release of bash-3.0 is now available via ftp and from the usual GNU mirror sites. For the official release notes by the author, Chet Ramey, check his usenet post."

Comments

GNAA EARLY POST

[Anonymous Coward]

DID I DO IT? LOLZ znegvanyq gjdgjfgjfgjfgjfgjfgjfgjfgjfgjfgjfgjfg

fp

[aeroz3]

fp!

FP!

[Anonymous Coward]

FP !

I'm still waiting for a feature

[Stevyn]

...a GTK front end

Re:I'm still waiting for a feature

[BrokenHalo]

...a GTK front end

There is. Try zenity.

Re:I'm still waiting for a feature

[Apreche]

gnome-terminal, duh.

Re:I'm still waiting for a feature

[Roguelazer]

$ gnome-terminal

Re:I'm still waiting for a feature

[Ari_Haviv]

how about...wizards?

Re:I'm still waiting for a feature

[SnoBall]

How about the ability to Bash Micro$oft? Of course, this could always be implemented when version 6.66 comes out.

Re:I'm still waiting for a feature

[SirPrize]

From the Zenity web page:

Zenity lets you display Gtk+ dialog boxes from the command line and through shell scripts. It is similar to gdialog, but is intended to be saner. It comes from the same family as dialog, Xdialog, and cdialog, but it surpasses those projects by having a cooler name.

Re:I'm still waiting for a feature

[liquidsin]

How about Clippy?

Hi! You appear to be typing something at the command prompt. It does not appear to be english. Maybe I can help. Would you like me to:

• spell-check it for you?
• change your local settings to another language?
• do nothing: sleeping on keyboard
• do nothing: that's PERL, you insensitive clod!
• fuck off

Re:I'm still waiting for a feature

[ultranova]

...a GTK front end

Try gnome-terminal, it's what I'm using. Apart from being a bit unstable, it works fine.

I sometimes also use a combination of VNC and Xterm. Not as pretty or refined (doesn't have tabs) but otherwise fine.

Re:I'm still waiting for a feature

[ksp]

What!!!
Are you saying you have never seen Vigor?!?
You don't need Clippy in a shell, you need him in your editor. Such as Vi...

Re:I'm still waiting for a feature

[Lord Kano]

"A witty saying proves nothing." --Voltaire

"Voltaire can suck on my balls."
-The Finchmeister

"I'm gonna hang out with my wang out. I'm gonna rock out with my cock out."
-Steve Stiffler

LK

Re:I'm still waiting for a feature

[Uncle Jimmy]

Apart from being a bit unstable, it works fine.

Yeah, great.

Re:I'm still waiting for a feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is an interesting idea that nobody has implemented yet (AFAIK). A marriage of both worlds (text-based shell + GUI).

The idea is that the GUI widgets should not appear in separate windows (cluttering up the screen), but as part of the scrolling text that is "printed" as an answer to the command you have typed into the command line.

The shell should maintain a vertical stack of GUI widgets, with a CommandLine widget at the bottom. The bottom of the widget stack should be always aligned with the bottom of the shell window (the scrollbar could be used to view the portions that have been scrolled out). When you type 'ls' into the CommandLine widget and press Enter, the event handler for the CommandLine widget analyzes the command and executes the 'ls' module of the shell, which returns a FileListing widget which is then inserted into the widget stack, right above the CommandLine widget. The FileListing widget may look like the result of an ordinary 'ls' shell command in bash, but you could right-click on the file/directory names and choose operations from pop-up menus, or you could SHIFT+click select list of files and associate them with shell variables which could be referenced in later commands given on the command line.

You could have several such widget stacks in one shell window, you could cut/paste between the widgets...

Here is how an SQL query might work:

myquery = sql.query("SELECT * FROM books WHERE title LIKE ?")
myquery.exec("compilers")

and you would get the results of the query in a table widget, with its own scrollbar. rows of the results could be selected, copied to clipboard and pasted to an e-mail composing widget in another session (or in the same session somewhere up in the stack).

huh?

[Leroy_Brown242]

People still use Bash?
I thought only newbs used it.

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

ksh: the only shell you'll need once you learn to wipe your own ass.

Re:huh?

[grahamlee]

Yeah; it surprised me when Apple switched *from* tcsh to bash. I mean, yeah the version of tcsh they used wasn't great, but still...

Fear the penguins!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice logo :-)

OMGOMGOMG

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been waiting long for this day!

First "zsh rules" post!

[Just Some Guy]

Bash was my first shell and I used it exclusively for years. One day, I'd read enough about zsh to force myself to give it a try. Oh how I loved thee, bash, but I won't be going back.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Anonymous Coward]

zsh is nice, but bash still has its applications. I run zsh on most places, but my laptop, and servers that are somewhat underpowered, stick with bash as a nice balance between the baroque zsh and a lightweight, but less usable shell.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Anonymous Coward]

insightful? please at least give a few reasons why zsh is better. I use bash, but i'm open to other possibilities.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[BrokenHalo]

Indeed: I've been a zsh convert for a while now (since I'm a slowish and lazy typer), and zsh is just the best shell environment by far.

As far as scripting is concerned, however, there's not a great deal of difference between zsh and bash, since the former is quite compatible with the latter.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Will everyone stop with the Bash bashing, please?

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Anonymous Coward]

can you give an exmaple of your .zshrc or whatever dot file you use?

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[opk]

Globs are more powerful: **/*.c will recursively search for .c files: much quicker to type than find.
You can match file types: e.g. *(@) will get you symlinks. *(U) gets files owned by you.

Syntax for alternation is a lot easier. No @(this|that) or !(*.f). Instead, it is (this|that) and ^*.f

Next point is completion. It includes a vast range of definitions so completion works well for lots of commands. The completion system handles completing parts of words so it better handles user@host completion. You get descriptions with completion match listings. Completion also has a really powerful context sensitive configuration system so you can make it work the way you like.

It has modules. For running a simple shell script it will actually use less space than bash because it doesn't need to load the line editor and other interactive related code into memory.

There is much much more. It takes a while to learn everything but if you just enable the completion functions (autoload -U compinit; compinit) you'll find it better than bash or tcsh from day 1.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Just Some Guy]

Bigs ones for me:

• A sane auto-completion system. That is, "cvs <tab>" gives a list of all of the commands that cvs understands. "cvs -<tab>" (same as above but tabbing after typing "-") gives a list of all of the options that cvs understands. These are good things. Now, in fairness, bash also has a command completion library. Unfortunately, it's implemented as a huge set of Bash functions. In zsh, "set|wc" returns 179 lines. In bash, "set|wc" returns 3,961 lines. The net effect is that zsh's system is noticeably faster and less polluting to the local environment.
• Modules. Wrappers for TCP connections, a built-in cron thingy, and PCRE are all loadable modules to do tricky things easily.
• Lots of pre-defined things. Load the "colors" and "zsh/terminfo" modules and you get defined associative arrays like $fg, which emits terminal-appropriate escape codes to set the foreground color of printed text. The command "echo ${fg[red]}red text${fg[default]}normal text" prints "red text" in red, and "normal text" in your default color.

Bash is a good shell, and I have nothing bad to say about it. However, zsh seems to have been designed from the ground up by power users and for power users. I absolutely love it and everyone that I've given a example config file to (to get them running with little hassle) has permanently switched.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't say parent bashed The Bash, he merely praised The ZSH.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Just Some Guy]

Sure! See:

• http://subwiki.honeypot.net/cgi-bin/view/Computing /DotZshRc
• http://subwiki.honeypot.net/cgi-bin/view/Computing /DotZshEnv

for the most recent versions of my .zshrc and .zshenv.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[SirPrize]

I find that the bash-completion features, once properly activated, as is done in the bash completion package here, can do a lot of similar things. I've been using bash for a number of years now, but continue to learn new features and functionality.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Hatta]

Bash is pretty big, is zsh really that much more resource intensive?

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Anonymous Coward]

A sane auto-completion system.

That's a nice feature of zsh. I'd like to see that as a default in Bash. Till then, here's how to add it under most Linux systems. Execute one of these commands;

apt-get install bash-completion

up2date install bash-completion

The first for apt-aware distributions (most are now), the second for Red Hat, Fedora, and a few others.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Just Some Guy]

As the maintainer of FreeBSD's bash-completion port, I'm reasonably familiar with it. Yes, it's approximately as powerful as zsh's completion module. Still, have you ever looked at it? It's a giant set of defined functions and glue. Seriously, get to a bash prompt and type "set" to see all of the things that've been stuffed into your shell's namespace. Now, try that with zsh and be pleasantly surprised.

As I said in another post, a big side effect is that zsh's completions seem to be much faster than bash's. That alone is worth the price of admission for me.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[An ominous Cow art]

Thank you, looks like these will be a good starting point for trying out zsh.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[ViolentGreen]

Well your post and a few others above have pretty much convinced me to give zsh a shot. I just have always used bash because it's the default.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Just Some Guy]

I mentioned this in another post, but I'm the maintainer of the shells/bash-completion port for FreeBSD. I'm pretty familiar with that script. While it does a pretty good job of working as expected, it definitely doesn't meet any definition of "sane" in common usage. Type "set" to look at the stuff it puts into your variable list.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not trolling here but as someone who's recently switched from bash to zsh I've found the completion to be, uh, inferior.

Which strikes me as odd because everywhere I've looked it's touted as one of the great features of zsh.

A few examples:
bash2.05# xine foo\t shows only playable files. zsh has no xine/mplayer completion, afaik.
bash2.05# screen -r foo\t shows socknames or pids. zsh shows contents of sockdir with ugly |'s on the end (i.e. pid before sockname).
bash2.05# apt-get install foo\t shows package name. zsh only completes on packages that aren't installed(!?). apt-get install installedpackage will upgrade only the installed package (if there is an upgrade...quite useful).

Anyway, I'm going to read up on writing completions in zsh so I can make things better (for me at least).

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[B'Trey]

Just started playing with zsh. Thanks for the files. However, irt these lines in .zshrc:

bindkey -e
bindkey '' backward-delete-char

I get the following: /home/username/.zshrc:bindkey:49: cannot bind to an empty key sequence

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Nachtfalke]

Up until recently, I also was a zsh user. But bash has one thing going for it, that zsh does not do: work with a UTF-8 locale.
The zsh line editor get's totally confused if you type for example an umlaut and backspace over it.
And since my native language uses umlauts, and I need a UTF-8 environment for work, I had to go back to bash. Unfortunately...

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Anonymous Coward]

everyone that I've given a example config file to (to get them running with little hassle) has permanently switched.

Want to post that file here?

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Just Some Guy]

Oh! That may be problematic for posting on a web page. The line actually reads:

bindkey '^?' backward-delete-char

where '^?' is actually the single CTRL+? character. If anybody knows a cleaner way to write that, please let me know and I'll amend the page.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[opk]

There's always going to be odd examples like that and it depends what commands you use. I'd bet most people would find more completions work for them right in zsh. Zsh also has a bashcompinit function which lets it use a bash completion function so you can always use the bash xine, screen and apt-get completion function.

The three things you mention are all easy to fix. Just post to zsh-workers and someone will help. Zsh does have an mplayer completion though you may need a slightly newer zsh. Restricting file typed is an easy one liner for xine.

Also, have you enabled the descriptions and messages in zsh completion. They make a big difference.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I appreciate that these are newbie issues and are not that hard to correct...

bashcompinit sounds promising as I wouldn't have to try and translate /etc/bash_completions myself.

Also, have you enabled the descriptions and messages in zsh completion.

No, how would I do that?

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Greg W.]

where '^?' is actually the single CTRL+? character. If anybody knows a cleaner way to write that, please let me know and I'll amend the page.

In bash, at least, you can use $'\177' -- I don't know whether that works in zsh.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Merk]

Yeah, that was a problem for me, then my musical tastes changed and I stopped listening to 80s metal bands. Now ZSH does all I need.

(hint)

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Merk]

Since people have listed the most obvious zsh features, I'll list some of the less major, but still cool ones:

• RPS1: easily set a prompt that is right aligned, opposite the normal left-aligned prompt. This is where many people put their current path. It means that as you change directories, the prompt always appears in the same place on your screen. RPS1 also disappears if you type enough characters to obscure it, so it doesn't take up valuable needed real-estate
• meta-x: Just like emacs, you can execute arbitrary zsh functions using meta-x
• vared: Conveneient, built-in editing of shell variables
• Named directories: first define a variable to refer to a directory and you get an easy alias to that directory (releases=/path/to/the/release/directory; cd ~releases)
• Fine-grained shell files: zshrc, zshenv, zprofile, zlogin, zlogout. This means your zsh scripts don't need to include your interactive shell aliases, that you can easily define login and logout actions...
• spelnig correction: My fingers are often too clumsy, when I type a command that is probably incorrect, zsh prompts me to see if it should correct my typo and execute the command I meant to type (optional of course but 90% of the time it does the right thing for me)
• saner redirection: to redirect both standard error and standard out to a process: "cvs -n update |& less"
• commandline editing: I have about 20 files that all start with a common prefix (us-2004- followed by month and day) and I want to use one of them in a command. Type "tar tf us" and it will fill in as much as it can, for me, the year. Hit again and it will list all the matches below the prompt. Hit yet again and I get a cursor on this list and I can use the arrow keys to select the list element that I want.

This is just off the top of my head. I'm not sure, maybe bash can do some or all of these things now, and I know I'm missing a lot of cool things I use all the time, but I just don't recall offhand what they are.

I started using zsh when I got an iBook running OS X and my two shell options were tcsh (default) and zsh. I hated tcsh, so I tried zsh, and I was hooked. Since then, OS X has come out with a bash version too, but I've seen no reason to switch back. In fact, all my linux boxen (servers included) all have my shell as zsh.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[HorsePunchKid]

I was a tcsh die-hard and evangelist for a long time, but when I moved over to Windows+Cygwin, I got used to Bash. Now I use Bash on my Linux box, too, and never really gave zsh a fair shot. That said, I've spent a fair amount of time customizing my Bash environment (prompt string, aliases, etc.). How hard would it be to transition to zsh? Can you hook me up with this example config file? (Contact me as sns@ the same domain as the website up by my Slashdot nickname, if you don't want to post a link here.)

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Ice_Balrog]

Care to post that config file? Zsh is sounding really cool. I would like to try it...

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Just Some Guy]

Fixed - thanks!

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Genghis Troll]

Try these lines in your .zshrc for starters:

zstyle ':completion:*:descriptions' format '%BCompleting %d:%b'
zstyle ':completion:*' group-name ''
zstyle ':completion:*' verbose yes
zstyle ':completion:*:messages' format '%d'
zstyle ':completion:*:warnings' format 'No matches for: %d'

'man zshcompsys' for descriptions of the many options.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Just Some Guy]

See my other post at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=116172&cid=983 2369. I fixed the '^?' problem on the website so it should be copy-and-pastable.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Genghis Troll]

bindkey accepts a two character notation as well, so "bindkey '^?' some-widget" with a literal caret and question mark should work too.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Just Some Guy]

Much better! Thanks for the tip.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[HorsePunchKid]

Excellent! Thanks for the files, and thanks for pursuing this thread so actively. I hope you've won some converts today!

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Just Some Guy]

Excellent! Thanks for the files, and thanks for pursuing this thread so actively.

Your welcome. Actually, I'm not sure why I'm tracking it so closely. I mean, I like zsh and bash, just one a bit more than the other. You'd think I owned stock in it from my posts, but I'm just a contended user. :)

I hope you've won some converts today!

Believe it or not, I'm really not that interested. What I would like is for more users to be exposed to the idea that bash isn't the only shell in widespread use. I was kind of nervous about making the leap to zsh ("But everyone uses bash!"), and I'd like to help other people try it out more easily. If they try it, hate it, and go back to bash within a few minutes, cool - at least they saw something other than what they're used to.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Just Some Guy]

That's just... I mean... Wow. Really. I just patched my .zshenv with

- export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$(find 2>/dev/null /tmp -maxdepth 2 -type s -user $USER -regex '/tmp/ssh-.*/agent\..*')
+ export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$(echo /tmp/ssh-*/agent.*(=UN))

That's sweet. Thanks for the pointer! The more I learn about zsh, the more I love it.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Theolojin]

Will everyone stop with the Bash bashing, please?

So you watched the Democratic National Convention, huh?

Oh...

*bash* bashing. heh.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[asit ler]

Yeah, it says something when the major thread in a bash release notification is about another shell, and how much bash ass it kicks.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[KozmoStevnNaut]

ISO-8859-15 is your saviour!

Zsh handles Motörhead just fine ;)

(I'm danish, by the way, so I need Æ Ø and Å in my filenames.)

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Project2501a]

[snip]
In zsh, "set|wc" returns 179 lines. In bash, "set|wc" returns 3,961 lines.

set | wc -l
man wc

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[caluml]

Anyone else ever try: # ping goo
and get annoyed when it doesn't work?

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Just Some Guy]

It does work for all hosts lists in /etc/hosts. Just so you know. :)

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[ion_]

ISO-8859-15 is your saviour!

Sorry, but no, it isn't.

We have this charset called ISO-8859-1 aka. ISO-Latin-1, which consists of 192 different characters. Here's a little problem: 192 different characters simply are not enough. Ok, we'll just switch to another charset... which has the limit of 192 different characters as well?

Unicode really solves the problem. I love zsh, but I'm also forced to use bash because zsh doesn't support UTF-8 correctly. I wish I or someone else had the time to implement it.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[Vanieter]

Not really, Gnome often complains when it's not UTF-8. Plus, UTF-8's just plain better than ISO-8859-1 (which is what I'd use since I'm a native French speaker). It's very annoying when zsh chokes on utf-8 as it's otherwise a great shell.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Well, as long as the standard on IRC is ISO-8859-x, I consider UTF-8 to be rather useless ;)

(-15 is the exact same as -1, BTW. It just adds Euro support, which is nice.)

I know that Gnome complains a bit when stuff is not Unicode, but properly set LC_ variables smooth out a lot of problems. Apps like Rox that only support UTF-8 are a pain in the ass, though. It's probably the only reason I'm still using Konqueror, since I refuse to move my system to Unicode before it's properly supported in all the apps I use.

And my addiction to Zsh probably means that it wont be soon ;)

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[sorbits]

I will certainly give it a try then!

Until now I have sticked with tcsh for one single reason: history substition!

Basically it lets me insert text from my history (including the current line) using few symbols (e.g. !$ is the last argument of the previous line) -- it's extremely powerful, e.g. it allows to search in the history and can do substitutions in results, or head/tail for paths etc.

I use it a lot to keep down the number of characters I need to type, and I have even assigned hotkeys to some of the substitutions I use the most.

This is really the make-or-break feature for wether or not I want to use a shell, so I really hope zsh has something similar!?!

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[opk]

You'll find that Zsh does csh/tcsh style history substitutions. All the things you're used to like !$ also work in zsh. I tend to use for the same thing as !$ unless I want to combine it with modifiers though. There are a number of tcsh inspired features and options to make things a little more csh-like. I converted from tcsh myself.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[caluml]

Hmm - that is pretty cool, but not too useful.. :)

Unless you have a /etc/hosts about 4 miles long.

Re:First "zsh rules" post!

[opk]

Also, have you enabled the descriptions and messages in zsh completion.

No, how would I do that?

Try:

zstyle ':completion:*' verbose yes
zstyle ':completion:*:descriptions' format '%B%d%b'
zstyle ':completion:*:messages' format '%d'
zstyle ':completion:*:warnings' format 'No matches for: %d'

Also useful is:

zstyle ':completion:*' group-name ''

You might want different formats of course. I'm assuming that you are running the compinit function.

Of the complaints you mentioned, at least the apt-get one will be fixed in the forthcoming zsh 4.2.1.

1st post!

[Anonymous Coward]

1st post! squared!

A new version?

[moonbender]

Hell, I didn't even know bash was still in active development. It was always just bash to me, not bash-x.y.z. But then I guess I wouldn't notice the difference, really.

Re:A new version?

[Smylers]

But then I guess I wouldn't notice the difference, really.

The new failglob option is something I've often wanted -- if I mess up a glob (or files that I thought were there don't actually exist) then I'd rather have an error than the raw glob characters be passed to the command. C Shell does this, and it's something I've been missing in Bash.

Smylers

bash

[ibmman85]

bashbashbashbash just fun to say. wonder if theyll be updating the cs systems at school, or if they ever really update the cs systems at school...

Re:bash

[ViolentGreen]

Well where I went they didnt for long enough that java was still 1.2.x. Of course now that I have graduated, they got a bunch of brand new G5s.

On the list of changes:

[meringuoid]

System-specific changes for: SCO Unix 3.2

What are these, I wonder? Something along the lines of changing the prompt to always display [litigious@bastards]$, perhaps?

Re:On the list of changes:

[grub]

I'm wondering why it's in the "LINUX" section of /. Bash is used across many different OSs.

Re:On the list of changes:

[Anonymous Coward]

Amusing comment noted but to stop any salacious rumours in the bud I shall quote the changelog -- cunningly named changelog in the archive.

SCO Unix 3.2, like Solaris, requires that the system's `timezone' variable be declared as long

Re:On the list of changes:

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

What category would you like to see it under, Star Wars?

Re:On the list of changes:

[archen]

Hey, if it saves us from the Slashdot 'IT' color scheme, I don't care. Hell, keep EVERYTHING out of IT I say.

Re:On the list of changes:

[Prowl]

GNU or Unix would seem to be the most appropriate

bash has been around since 1989 (according to copywrite on man page). Linux 1.0 came around 5 years later.

The editors should know better, unless they're intentionally trying to piss off RMS

Re:On the list of changes:

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

OK, that does make sense. I guess I'd forgotten that SlashDot HAD a Unix category; 85% of the people here seem to run Linux and only Linux.

Re:On the list of changes:

[sigxcpu]

Does that mean that Solaris stole their 'timezone' from SCO?

Re:On the list of changes:

[upsidedown_duck]

"GNU" might be best, because doesn't bash also run under Windows? Then, of course, Slashdot would make things confusing again by running an article on ksh...

Re:On the list of changes:

[Bingo Foo]

If you're running OS X, go to the "Universal Access" preference pane and click "Set Display to Grayscale"

Re:On the list of changes:

[rsidd]

Bash is used across many different OSs.

But it's the default Bourne shell only on linux (and cygwin). The BSDs, for example, use a small, statically-linked (for system recovery) "real" Bourne shell.

Re:On the list of changes:

[k.ovaska]

"GNU" might be best, because doesn't bash also run under Windows?

Confirmed. I'm running bash-2.05 on Windows 2000/Cygwin. I used to run 4NT/4DOS (for 10 years or so), but I switched, and after a bit (well, quite a bit) configuration it felt just fine.

Re:On the list of changes:

[Scott Wood]

It's the default /bin/sh on recent versions of MacOS X as well.

Re:On the list of changes:

[Anonymous Coward]

doesn't bash also run under Windows?

Dunno if there's a native port, but I've been using it under Interix (aka Microsoft StFU). But I'll probably be lazy and wait for Interop Systems to do their thing, since they don't seem to target it directly.

Re:On the list of changes:

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, people with access to Slashdot's logs have mentioned the breakdown of Slashdot's readers based on user-agent strings in the past. I forget the exact numbers, but Linux wasn't nearly as high as 85%.

Re:On the list of changes:

[Anonymous Coward]

"What category would you like to see it under, Star Wars?"

That would be awesome!!

Re:On the list of changes:

[yuri benjamin]

User-agent strings are not reliable. Some people change them to view IE-only sites. It also does not take into account those who read /. at work but run a different OS at home. Which raises the question - why do I read /. at work and not at home? Sometimes it's busy in this call centre, sometimes it's not.

Neat

[stratjakt]

Someone tell me why I want this. The Usenet post doesn't seem to explain what's so exciting about it, besides a bunch of boring bug-fixes, and some esoteric-sounding syntax changes.

Re:Neat

[DAldredge]

Don't worry about it. Just let the adults keep using their computers and you can keep using your as a toy.

(It's a shell, it's not susposed to be exciting)

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's the latest version, duh! Remember, if you're running Slackware 9 on a Pentium III 2600MHz with 512MB of RAM, you are so five minutes ago. Part of the thing about being a certain type of geek is that you must have the latest versions of everything, and must be able to spend all day telling your friends how you upgraded to the latest Perl last night, and you're looking forward to some of the new features on the latest point-point release of Python tonight that you plan to download and compile yourself, preferably with -funroll-loops, on your shiny Gentoo box.

Re:Neat

[stratjakt]

Why a major version release with only minor point-release changes?

From what I can tell, bash 3.0 doesn't do anything that 2.x didn't do. Except, no doubt, break every script in my system if I were to install it.

Re:Neat

[Brad Moore]

According to the changelog, all the messages are internationalized now, so if you spoke a language other than English, you can get error messages and such in your native language.

Re:Neat

[pete-classic]

It supports a new sequence brace expansion which should make snarfing porn easier and more efficent.

Does it get more exciting then that?

-Peter

Re:Neat

[ellem]

As part of the deal with Apple making fixes they need to get Bash to version 10 ASAP for Bash X marketing.

Re:Neat

[BrokenHalo]

if you're running Slackware 9 on a Pentium III 2600MHz with 512MB of RAM, you are so five minutes ago.

No. You are 15 months ago. Slackware 9 was succeeded by 9.1 on 2003-09-26 and 10 on 2004-06-23.

Re:Neat

[Jugalator]

(It's a shell, it's not susposed to be exciting)

Pfft... I thought geeks browsed Slashdot!

Re:Neat

[Chris_Jefferson]

The main difference is full internationalisation support, which deserves a full version upgrade :)

Unless you have scripts which used the old slightly dubious (but still not bad) internationalisation then you should notice no differences at all. There are a couple of really, really stupid looking scripts which now produce something different, but in almost every single case the new answer is I'm sure what everyone expected to appear before :)

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a welcome addition indeed. Until now, I've been using curl (as opposed to wget) to "snarf porn". It's worth looking at as it has features besides sequence expansion.

Re:Neat

[IWannaBeAnAC]

You mean something like
wget http://porn.com/image{1..300}.jpg ?

Neat! (assuming I got the syntax right;)

Re:Neat

[KodaK]

you can get error messages and such in your native language.

This is so going to suck. If I get an error message that I'm unfamiliar with I'll plug it into google. Even if the hit is in a language I don't understand I can usually work out what a solution to my problem may be by looking at the command sequences posted in replies.

Now I'll lose that ability just because a bunch of whiners (the rest of the world) want error messages in *their* language. That's just not fair, as it doesn't benefit me.

I propose an immediate reversal of the i18n changes introduced into Bash 3.0. Who's with my jingoistic ass?

Re:Neat

[A Big Gnu Thrush]

Pfft... I thought geeks browsed Slashdot!

Real geeks do browse /.

Only lusers post.

Oh, wait...damn.

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

I vote we standardise on Swahili.

Re:Neat

[C_Kode]

From what I can tell, bash 3.0 doesn't do anything that 2.x didn't do. Except, no doubt, break every script in my system if I were to install it.

pfft, thats why it's called 3.0. Backwards compatibility is for sluzers. Why do you think we make *upgrades* When we run out of things to tweak on our system we upgrade so we can start the tweak process again. It's called conquering the on-slot of boredom.

Start your apt-get Engines,

emerge break-my-system.1.4.3
rpm -Uvh break-X.org-3.2.5.rpm
etc, etc, etc

Woohoo!! :P

Wow, I need to slow down on the coffee!

signing off...

logout

Re:Neat

[bmf033069]

How about supporting that syntax directly in a browser? It would be nice to drop http://porn.com/image{1..300}.jpg right into the location bar.

Re:Neat

[Terrasque]

This reminds me of a conversation I once had with a friend:

Him : Finally, after several days, the whole system,
including the command line is in Chinese!

Me : Wow. I didn't even know you understood Chinese!

Him : (smiling happily) I dont!

Re:Neat

[tunabomber]

Well, that explains all those "ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!" messages I've been getting...kinda. ...dammit, Jim, stop logging in as root and echoing crap to my termiRELAXEN UND WATCHEN DAS BLINKENLICHTENnals!

Re:Neat

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Cool, but just saves a process. Could do this with seq before.
seq 1 30 | xargs -i wget http://pr0nsite.com/image{}.jpg
Not that I'd try this or anything... no...

I do want to get a T-Shirt made:
Real geeks download their pr0n with one line shell-scripts.

Re:Neat

[upsidedown_duck]

Google supports multi-lingual searches. Not being multi-lingual myself, I still get a kick out of cutting and pasting non-roman alphabets into Google and getting real results back. Language barriers from a support point of view will always exist, so the same native-language mailing lists and web pages will go on as they always have.

Perhaps the best way to make sense of multi-lingual error messages is to alway have a numeric ID number with each message (programmers take note), meaning that the text is irrelevant as long as someone can look up the number itself. I hope no one takes this to the extreme, though, like old IBM PCs ("Error 58 occurred. Please give us your money to tell you what error 58 actually is!").

Re:Neat

[swb]

...and charging $129 for subsequent point upgrades thereafter.

Re:Neat

[carpe_noctem]

...either that or change the project name to "iBash".

hrms, that's kinda catchy, aint it?

Re:Neat

[Megaweapon]

As part of the deal with Apple making fixes they need to get Bash to version 10 ASAP for Bash X marketing.

"I was writing a command string in the bash shell, and it was, like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and then, like, half of my grep string was gone. And I was, like ... huh? It devoured my regex pattern. It was a really good pattern. And then I had to do it again and I had to do it fast so it wasn't as good. It's kind of a bummer."

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

If it works, break it, huh?

Re:Neat

[klokop]

Couldn't stop giggling... :-)

Re:Neat

[Morphine007]

It's called conquering the on-slot of boredom

Sewry, I dunt knormelly dew this, butt I beleeve u mehnt too teype onslut and knot on-slot... trie hewked on fonix eh? freggin looser ;-)

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

onslaught

Re:Neat

[Nachtfalke]

Damn, that's good. That's much slicker than the
for a in `seq 1 30`; do wget http://pr0nsite.com/image${a};done
that I never use.

Re:Neat

[RealAlaskan]

...either that or change the project name to "iBash".

iBash, youBash, we all Bash for iBash...
IBM, you BM, we all BM for IBM ...

No, it simply isn't as catchy as the original. We'll have to go with BashX.

Re:Neat

[drinkypoo]

The world could learn something from IBM here. In at least AIX and maybe other IBM operating systems, when you run a command and you get an error message, each error message has a unique ID which can be used to look up errors. Presumably these IDs are identical from one language to the next. IIRC they are four bytes, displayed in hex. They are probably unique only to a given executable these days, but might correspond to an AIX version (or other OS version) instead.

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

This comes close

Re:Neat

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Great.

I've been waiting to refine that command which I also never use.

Re:Neat

[RWerp]

LANG=en_US
export LANG

and you're done.

Re:Neat

[AKAImBatman]

As part of the deal with Apple making fixes they need to get Bash to version 10 ASAP for Bash X marketing.

Umm... this has me slightly worried that Grandma will see the IRC client and freak...

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

They upped the version number. That's always both significant and important. We should all invest time and/or money into obtaining the new version, as it is the latest version available.

Re:Neat

[pete-classic]

Yeah, except in Latin. How the fuck do I look up error MMMDCCCXLVII?

-Peter

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

There I've not been plugging in a list of filenames into a variable and not passing that to a for..in loop to not snarf porn like some jackass. Still, the system that I don't use is much better if the filenames arn't sequential, as they often arn't on a lot of freebie porn sites. A friend once told me. He imagined.

Re:Neat

[the chao goes mu]

I go with the intercal solution: All output in Latin!

Re:Neat

[cgreuter]

This is so going to suck. If I get an error message that I'm unfamiliar with I'll plug it into google. Even if the hit is in a language I don't understand I can usually work out what a solution to my problem may be by looking at the command sequences posted in replies.

I don't think this will be a problem. All it means is that you'll only get the English-language hits when you do your search, since the (say) Russian error messages will be posted to Russian-language lists.

Who's with my jingoistic ass?

Dude, that toilet paper is there for a reason.

Re:Neat

[Da Web Guru]

if you're running Slackware 9 on a Pentium III 2600MHz with 512MB of RAM

Where did you find a PIII 2.6GHz? I didn't think that any cooling system (short of dropping the entire system into liquid nitrogen) could handle a 1300+ MHz overclock on a PIII...

Re:Neat

[rm -vrf]

Download curl, then you can do stuff like

curl http://hugetractsofland.com/{amy,crystal}/[01-05]/ img[1-99].jpg -o "#1#2-#3.jpg"

The perfect command....which I've yet to find a use for. um..yeah.

Re:Neat

[agraupe]

Well, right now most of the top results are German or Russian, so at least it might filter it. Like that other person said... and remember, Google can translate things (which is at least entertaining, if not accurate).

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

I am getting tired of all these *nix bashers!

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

(+1, Informative)
(+10, Monty Python Reference)

Re:Neat

[nusratt]

"if you spoke a language other than English, you can get error messages and such in your native language"

-- a language other than English -- you mean, like 'Murikin, or blue-dy Scutch?
-- error messages and such in your native language -- mine's l33t, so i'm covered, right?

Re:Neat

[karlwilbur]

How the fuck do I look up error MMMDCCCXLVII?

Now that's funny.

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap, some of the people who replied to your post totally failed to grasp it. Perhaps it's their advice, in their native tongues, which we up-till-now have benefitted from?

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

http://vaxcave.com/ellen.mov

Re:Neat

[KodaK]

Holy crap, some of the people who replied to your post totally failed to grasp it.

I get that a lot. Maybe I should use smaller words.

Re:Neat

[yuri benjamin]

You are über-MCCCXXXVII

Re:Neat

[yuri benjamin]

The main difference is full internationalisation support

Now you can right trüly evïl shell scripts.

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

why not 'export LANG=en_US'?

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

I could...

Re:Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

Save more processes!

wget -vc `seq -f 'http://pr0nsite.com/image%02g.jpg' 1 30`

Re:Neat

[mikis]

Ta-dah! Install Magpie Firefox plugin, and you can do things like:

Bulk download files within numeric ranges using the Bukster (bkstr) protocol, e.g. bkstr://www.site.com/{01-125}/{01-10}.jpg downloads 1250 jpeg images in the appropriate numeric ranges.

Re:Neat

[fm6]

So people who work in other languages should have a harder time, just so you can profit from their work. Yeah, that's fair!

Article transcript, in case of slashdotting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! Gotcha! No, /. can't /. Google yet. :)

Not much changed

[opk]

Doesn't seem to be much changed given the version number increase. [[ =~ ]] can match regexes and it can do zsh style {1..3} expansions. Improved multibyte support too. There were bigger changes in some of the 2.0x updates.

Re:Not much changed

[gdbear]

Posix compliance ... hrmm... seems like a change warranting a full version increase.

Re:Not much changed

[Anonymous Coward]

Time stamps in history are HUGE.

New features?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can it make me coffee?

Re:New features?

[greck]

No, bash 3.0 is not compliant with RFC 2324.

My sister and I get started...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm writing these experiences with my sister and neighbors were how I remember them. Some of the dialog is added for readability, as most of it is forgotten now, but I remember the fear, anticipation, and lust that I felt at the time. Relating the incidents, helps bring it back to life. I knew that we were doing something that could get us in trouble, and the forbidden nature definitely added to the excitement for all of us.

The first experience with my sister was the very next day, after showing both my sisters some of my father's porn. At the time both my parents were outside in the yard, talking to a neighbor and Kathy was staying the night with a friend. Jackie asked if I could show her the books again.

We went to my room, where I pulled the books out from their hiding spot. She picked one with mostly pictures, and started asking questions again. I asked her what she thought about the pictures. She responded that they were strange, and that they made her feel naughty. She asked me if I ever played with my 'boner.'

I said "I wanted you and Kathy to play with it last night. Since you wouldn't, I did after I got back to my room. Do you ever play with yourself?"

She was reluctant. "Kathy played with herself last night, when she thought I was asleep."

I was surprised. "How did you know?"

"I heard her." After some prompting, Jackie admitted that she played with herself the previous night as well.

Pointing to a picture of a boy going down on a girl, she asked if my dick looked like that when it was hard. I asked if she wanted to see for herself. Our family was never very modest, and I know that she had seen me without my clothes before, but she had never seen me with a hardon.

After checking that my parents were still outside, we agreed to view each other close up. We both pulled our shorts and underwear down.

My sister sat on my bed and I stood directly in front of her. She took a few moments to observe and comment that it was weird, nothing like hers. Afterward, I spent some time investigating her. She had a small growth of hair, mostly coming in above her pussy.

Being the older brother, I took the initiative, and reached forward to spread her pussy lips. When I used my fingers to spread her labia, she spread her legs a little more and took a breath. I then ran my fingers over the length of her pussy.

She asked if she could touch my 'boner.' I asked her if she wanted to try some of the things that she saw in the book. "Yeah, I wanted to last night, but was too afraid after Kathy said no."

I showed her how to grasp my dick; she took to it like she had been doing it forever. While she played with me, I ran my fingers over her pussy. After a very short while I got scared that my parents would return, so I suggested that she take one of the books and the little light that I used to read in bed. She could could read it in the dark, until I snuck into her room.

She took the one that she had been looking through. It had many pictures of young people in different sexual positions. I don't honestly remember if the pictures were actually of kids, or of actors portraying kids. I just knew that Jackie was interested.
That night, I easily snuck into Jackie's room. We both slept with our doors closed, so if we were quiet, there was little risk of getting caught.

Jackie was awake, when I slid into her room. When I asked what she was doing, she pulled her covers back to show me the book, the flashlight, and that she was already naked.

She told me to take my shorts off. I kept my t-shirt on and sat between my sister's twin beds. I asked her that since she had the book, what did she want to try first. She hesitated. "You pick."

I had a girlfriend at the time, and we did some petting. I was keenly interested in knowing about oral sex, but was afraid that I would be taking things too fast, so I told her that I wanted to know how to touch a girl in a way that would get them most excited. At the time, I had no idea

People still use a shell for Linux?

[SollyCholly]

Ever since I installed Fedora Core I've used the GNOME GUI exclusively with no problems and no descrease in functionality. It make administration of my Linux network a breeze.

Why type when you can just point and click?

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[ylikone]

Because you can NEVER be quite sure of what files are being manipulated when you are using a GUI.

Why use a middleman when you have access to the source?

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[RLiegh]

Pretty much the same way here, except that I use Knoppix instead of Fedora.

I've been using Linux for years, but - being a non-developer - I'm finding less and less reason to use the commandline (unless I'm using a CLI app such as lynx, bitchx or dopewars).

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dopewars!

The reason the CLI was invented!

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[gowen]

Why type when you can just point and click?

Batch jobs. You just can't beat

for i in img*.jpg; do convert $i $(basename $i .jpg).png; done

Everything else, I do in emacs...

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[datastalker]

Ok, please tell me how I can change the SOA on 150 domain files all at once with pointing and clicking. In bash, it's: sed -i s/oldSOA/newSOA/g * Until there's a way to do search and replace on any number of files that's easier than that, the command line will still be useful.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[rikkus-x]

for i in img*.jpg; do convert $i $i:r.png; done

Slightly shorter way for zsh, in case you were using it already and didn't know about the $var:x stuff.

Rik

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I write a C program for every file interaction I make... I don't trust nothing but the syscalls and the compiler!

Heck, the shell could be doing ANYTHING, man... Who knows!? There may be codes in there that are like, I dunno, MESSING with my home directory, dude.

Insighful my ass.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

for i in img*.jpg; do convert $i png:${i/.jpg/.png}; done

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Atzanteol]

find . -type f -exec chmod a+r \{\} \;

find . -type d -exec chmod a+rx \{\} \;

Or would you rather go through every file in ~/public_html, right-click on it, and change the perms?

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Idealius]

The same can happen using the shell.

When you run a binary from the shell are you ever sure what files it's accessing?

If you log it, sure -- but there are tools to do that in the GUI, too.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[generationxyu]

Point and click is not necessarily intuitive. As Bruce Ediger said, the only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Esel Theo]

Why type when you can just point and click?

Well, for me it's more like ``Why point and click when you can just type.'' Pointing and clicking seems to be quick and productive only on the first view. Have you ever seen somebody who really knows how to work in a text terminal?

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[simetra]

Many Linux distributions are installed as servers and require no GUI. Many aren't even hooked up to a monitor, much less a mouse. Cron jobs and other stuff can do shell stuff as whatever user you specify. Users can telnet/rlogin/ssh in and do stuff. The shell is very important in this regard. In fact, your pretty gui probably uses the shell way more than you're aware.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[gowen]

Slightly shorter way for zsh, in case you were using it already and didn't know about the $var:x stuff.

I do use zsh, and I was aware of this feature but no matter how i try, I cannot seem to remember the syntax :( So I use the one I can remember...

There's an equivalent one in bash, too. (Goes and looks it up)

for i in img*.jpg; do convert $i ${i%.jpg}.png; done

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[gowen]

Not quite the same. If there's a file called img0001.jpg.jpg, the results will differ.

${i%.png}.jpg will do it tho' (% only matches trailing patterns)

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[archen]

Krename ?

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[hackstraw]

With zsh (and I think some other shells), you can do one liner for loops without the do/done.

For example:

for i in img*.jpg <RETURN>
convert $i `basename $i .jpg` <RETURN>

I do for loops all the time, and in my experience zsh is most flexable with them.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Hatta]

he's using convert, not mv.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[millermj]

Why dig through menus looking for a turkey sandwich when you could just type in that you want a turkey sandwich! Why people think that GUIs are easy to use is beyond me. Does look pretty, though.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[JimDabell]

Bad example. Using KDE, I click on my home directory icon, select the images I want to convert, right-click on one of them and pick Actions | Convert To | PNG.

This is just as quick, doesn't require you to memorise complicated syntax, and doesn't require filenames that follow a common pattern.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[gowen]

Bad example.

Well, maybe. But the point is, its a completely general example. Konq lets you convert to PNG, command lines let you perform arbitrary actions (set as wallpaper, mail them to my friends, upload them to my webpage, or any combination of the lot).

Also, find gives me even more flexibility. I want to select only those jpgs with a "2" in the filename, that are bigger than 173k, and convert those to .eps files, I could do that to.

Or I could use the batch job to make thumbnails called thumbnails/img0001_thumb.png or whatever. KDE (and GUI's in general) lets you things the developer thinks you might want to do. Command lines, cryptic syntax and all, enable me to do *exactly* what I want to do.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[carlmenezes]

How would you use the GNOME GUI to parse a dynamic HTML file, extract some data, re-format it and mail you the content on a regular basis?

OK...the "periodic" functionality can be got with a GUI based scheduler, but what would u schedule?

Open a terminal...10 minutes of shell scripting with sed, awk and a few regular expressions and your work is done through a simple shell script.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[kflash15]

Why type when you can just point and click?

Because I type a lot faster than I mouse...

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[skurk]

Why type when you can just point and click?

Because some tasks are easier from shell than GUI.

Take this, for example, counting the unique visits from your apache access log. How would you do this in GUI?

awk '{print$1}' /var/log/apache/access_log|sort|uniq|wc -l

Maybe that's a stupid example, but you get my point.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

that does not compute here.... a two-line one-liner? //fatal

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if the option or program you're searching for is not in the menus somewhere, you're screwed.

Having a shell ready can let you do complex operations in a short amount of time, if you know how to use simple tools such as grep and the operators.

Heck even the windows cmd.exe can be useful at times

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have one or two images then I can agree with you, but when you have converted 1000 images then right-click -> Actions -> Convert To -> PNG is the hard way and typing a "complex" command _once_ is the easy way.... // fatal

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[JimDabell]

You misunderstand. The right-click... action only has to be performed once, and it operates on all selected files. You don't have to perform the action a thousand times.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[defsdoor]

| sort -u

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[ianezz]

Bad example. Using KDE, I click on my home directory icon, select the images I want to convert, right-click on one of them and pick Actions | Convert To | PNG.

Ok, now do it every morning, at 3am, except on Sundays, and move corrupted images to the trashcan.

The point of a shell script is not to automate one-time generic tasks (that's what your context menu entry is for), but to automate one-time higly specific tasks (for which you can't reasonabily expect to have a predefined context menu entry) or unattended tasks that have to be executed many-times.

In the end, scripting everything is dumb, but requiring your presence to do the same task by hand over and over is dumber. You know the saying, "be quiet or I'll replace you with a very small shell script", there is a reason behind that.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Scarblac]

Starting up that explorer, selecting the files (manually checking if I have all of them, and only the right ones, perhaps, or having to scroll), then doing right click, is slower for me than typing in that command line.

Besides, I can still do the command line thing logged in over ssh, which is regularly.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[glsunder]

Why type when you can just point and click?

I point at putty, then click twice on putty really fast. After selecting a server, I type.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[MimsyBoro]

Why not use emacs for this too! In dired mode use type % R And your only a simple regular expression away from sucess ( \(.*\).jpg ---> \1.png ). Emacs - now thats an operating system ;-)

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[gowen]

Thats only for renaming tho'. My one-liner actually converts the file format from jpeg to PNG.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

rm -rf /*

But seriously, a command line user who can touch type at a decent speed can appear like Commander Data -- tacka tacka tacka as stuff scrolls by on the screen at an amazing rate. It's a skill, and if you don't have it, pointing and clicking might be just as fast or faster than having to look stuff up and then hunting and pecking. But if you use the computer alot, command line + touch typing is a set of skills worth investing some time developing.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[JimDabell]

Starting up that explorer, selecting the files (manually checking if I have all of them, and only the right ones, perhaps, or having to scroll), then doing right click, is slower for me than typing in that command line.

I daresay it is. That's because you aren't comparing similar tasks any more. You are missing out starting up a shell, switching to the right directory, selecting a filename pattern that matches the files you want, etc. The previous command-line example assumed that you were logged in and had already chosen the files.

Besides, Konqueror offers shortcuts - if you think it's easier to type in a filename pattern, you can do so and have only those files showing.

Besides, I can still do the command line thing logged in over ssh

What's your point? X is network transparent too, and Konqueror can perform the same tasks over ssh, ftp, and a range of other protocols even if X wasn't network transparent.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[JimDabell]

The point of a shell script...

We've been talking about interactive use, not scripting. If I was going to script something, I'd use Python or Perl, not a shell script. Shell scripts are pretty hideous compared with any decent scripting language. "The right tool for the job" and all that...

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[ortcutt]

I don't think you understand. While on Windows you can use Putty to connect with SSH to a remote Unix machine to use a shell on that remote machine, on Linux you can run a local shell and do things on your local machine that you can't do with pointing-and-clicking.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fools! He's merely using your comments to extract all the powerful shell commands in the world! What if he sells these secrets to Microsoft??! Then they'd be able to change permissions for all files or get all the porn off a website!!!11

There's a quote I'm reminded of that I recall from bash.org (ironically, heh) that said something to the effect of "if you need help from a Linux expert, don't come out and say that. Say 'Linux sucks because it can't do XXX' and you'll get 50 ways to do it."

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[archie]

Or just use the +X option for chmod, which will add execute permission for entries which already have them for other users. So in this example a+rX would save you some work.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[jacrawf]

Why leave Emacs?

M-x eshell

:-)

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Jesus_666]

I used to point and click a lot in Windows, but ever since I've installed Linux/KDE I do 99.9% of all interactions with the file system from a Konsole window. I don't know why, but using a file manager just doesn't feel right.

Besides, I like to do stuff like cp `locate -n1 common.file` .

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Jesus_666]

Most of the time I try to use Krename to batch-rename something I end up doing most of it by hand. Especially handling extensions is a major headache.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Atzanteol]

Nifty. Didn't know about that option. I'd always thought it would be nice to have. Guess I should have read the man page a bit eh?

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Deaths Hand]

Phew! Typing 'basename', that's far too many characters. How about;

for i in img*.jpg; do convert $i ${i%.jpg}.png; done

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[the chao goes mu]

If I recall, Konquerer doesn't easily display multiple directories for this single-click change, does it? so a command line "find ./ -user X -exec chown Y {} \;" can do in one action something it would take any number of konquerer actions to do.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

He knows.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do the same task using half as many processes.

sort -u -k 1,2 /var/log/apache/access_log | wc -l

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[kelnos]

if you're preaching about "the right tool for the job", you'd recognise that python or perl is probably overkill for some of the more simpler tasks, such as the previous example of converting jpegs to pngs, or perhaps renaming a bunch of files, etc.

funny how you call shell scripts "hideous", when a not-insignificant number of people find perl syntax just as nasty (for the record, i happen to love perl).

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[jeavis]

Does this fall under the "useless use of cat" category? I see it all the time in shell scripts. Instead of:

for i in img*.jpg; do convert $i $(basename $i .jpg).png; done

Try this:

for i in img*.jpg; do convert $i ${i%.jpg}.png; done

Saves one process per iteration, and works with any Bourne or Bourne-ish shell.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[jpkeane]

Hate to be a pedant but:

chmod -R a+rX .

will do the same things quicker...

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[toga98]

find . -type f -exec chmod a+r \{\} \;
find . -type d -exec chmod a+rx \{\} \;

Alternately, you can improve upon the speed by doing...

find . -type f | xargs chmod a+r
find . -type d | xargs chmod a+rx

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand. He was trying to be funny.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

what? linux can make turkey sandwiches? how did you get your computer to do that from the command line? i knew i shouldn't have bought this stupid second-hand mac plus. i can't find the turkey sandwich menu anywhere, and i'm still waiting for my tab.

Re:People still use a shell for Linux?

[shadow_slicer]

Say I have 10000 files in 1000 folders (sorted neatly by date category and type). Can you convert all those files without disrupting my perfect organization?

for item in `find -iname \*.jpg`; do
convert $item `echo $item | sed 's/jpg/png/'`;
done

Bashing linux at slashdot

[badriram]

I am looking at the title going a Linux bash headline on slashdot, now i must have been dreaming. But I am sure that i would not post that here, knowing i would loose all my karma in one stroke.

Re:Bashing linux at slashdot

[monkey_jam]

knowing i would loose all my karma in one stroke.

I had that problem once... completely ruined my keyboard...

Bash the ladies at....

[Anonymous Coward]

Bash your very own kernel toy Visit your nearest location today.

Apple helping out

[Macka]

Several bug fixes for POSIX compliance came in from Apple; their assistance is appreciated.

It's nice to see yet more contributions from Apple to the OSS community.

Re:Apple helping out

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

"It's nice to see yet more contributions from Apple to the OSS community."

Right on, brother. (This is not bashing apple before i get started!) They have done something that no one else in the *nix world has done: shit-hot gui. People can blather about this and that, but to deny that Apple has created one of the most user-friendly, beautiful, slick gui's for *nix is crazy. I'd like to continue seeing Apple release more help to OSS. Keep the real money makers to themselves (for now), but allow more dev's to release usefull changes back to the community that helped build it ya know?

You are 100% correct that it's nice to see them making another move like this...even if it was a lil' one :)

Re:Apple helping out

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to see yet more obvious pointing out with an agenda. ;-)

Re:Apple helping out

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's nice to see yet more contributions from Apple to the OSS community."

Bash is an official GNU project so really, Apple are contributing to the Free Software community not the OSS community.

Re:Apple helping out

[Anonymous Coward]

SHUT YOUR CAKE HOLE YOU FUCKING PEDANTIC SHITHEAD

# Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
# Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.

Re:Apple helping out

[videodriverguy]

I should think they would help out, given the significant amount of money they are making from OSS.

However, I suspect that people's attitude toward them might change when they read about Apple's attempt to prevent Real from putting songs 'not from iTunes' onto 'their' iPod. Funny, I thought I OWNED my iPod and could do with it what I want (including using EphPod for my music). Seems Apple is now thinking like some other companies we know well here on Slashdot - it's not your iPod, it's belongs to them.

Sorry for the off topic stuff, but hearing that Apple's next iPod update will try to prevent Real from accessing 'their' iPod makes my blood boil.

Re:Apple helping out

[russint]

Sure, they created a great gui. But when is it going to be ported to x86?

Re:Apple helping out

[gears5665]

yeah but do we really need bash quicktime support?

Re:Apple helping out

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick, someone post this a third time. Mention Apple and instantly +5. You Apple zealot moderators should have noticed this was already mentioned further up and it too is at +5. Funny thing though, another post mentioned other big businesses that contribute and it is only currently at +2.
Apple zealots unite. You must justify to everyone without why you feel Apple is better then the others. Justifing the extra costs and hassles of Apple must really bother you guys..

Re:Apple helping out

[dfj225]

The thing that really gets me about Apple is that they made stuff actually work. I do like Apple's gui, but I would have been happy using KDE or Gnome if thats what it came too. However, the one thing, in my mind, that they have done for *nix that no one else has is made it easy to use. If you plug something in, chances are it will work. Installing something? No problem, either drag it to the apps folder or just run the install program (the link to which is often made painfully obvious when the cd loads). I have used linux in the past, and never has it been overly easy to install anything. If someone could create a linux distro that came even close to OS X, it would be a huge success, IMHO.

Re:Apple helping out

[squiggleslash]

I don't believe that Apple's GUI was ever contributed to the OSS community.

Re:Apple helping out

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect that people's attitude toward them might change

There are only two types of Apple users, zealots and blind apologists.

To both of them, if Apple does it, it was really for the good of everyone and you should not even question it.

Thank you Apple, can I have another. Thank you Apple, can I have another. Thank you Apple, can I have another.

Re:Apple helping out

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea we really need to bash quicktime. Oh... er... that's not what you said, is it.

Re:Apple helping out

[pete-classic]

Since this is a GNU project it is an example of Apple helping out the Free Software community.

This may seem pedantic, lumping a project in with a community that is expressly disclaimed by the people doing the work is rather rude.

-Peter

Re:Apple helping out

[TKinias]

scripsit dfj225:

I have used linux in the past, and never has it been overly easy to install anything.

Obligatory Debian plug:

sudo apt-get install package

It doesn't get much easier...

Re:Apple helping out

[dfj225]

Ok...with the exception of that. You got me there. However, it doesn't work when say...you want to get a wireless card working with Linux. Also, at one point I did have a version of apt-get working with red hat RPMs. However, if you wanted something that was not on the list, it was still a pain to install. My point is, despite apt-get, it is still not as easy as dragging a file to a folder. How many non-geeks will know to use apt-get?

Re:Apple helping out

[asuffield]

> to deny that Apple has created one of the most user-friendly, beautiful, slick gui's for *nix is crazy.

Well then colour me crazy, because that awful thing is ugly, clumsy, and slow. It's like having a glowing orange pogo stick, when you could be driving a car.

Even the UI fanboys have stopped being Apple fanboys these days; where they used to do nothing but sing hymns of praise to Apple all day, now they spend their time complaining about how awful that same product is.

I find this PR campaign Apple are pursuing, where they paint themselves as "community members" or as being friendly to free software, to be rather tasteless. It's nothing but "let them eat cake". People fall for it (inevitably, because people are stupid), but that doesn't change anything.

Re:Apple helping out

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we need a new poll:

Most annoying users:
1) Gentoo users
2) Apple users
3) Windows users

I vote for 2.

Re:Apple helping out

[TKinias]

scripsit dfj225:

However, it doesn't work when say...you want to get a wireless card working with Linux.

Hmm. My experience with wireless cards is that they either don't work at all (i.e., there's no driver) or you just plug it in and it works automagically (my Orinoco, for example, and a couple I've borrowed here and there). I've never had to do any installation or config of anything...

My point is, despite apt-get, it is still not as easy as dragging a file to a folder. How many non-geeks will know to use apt-get?

For me, apt-get is easier than dragging stuff around with a mouse -- but I almost always prefer CLI to GUI. YMMV.

But for the GUI-era types, there are GUI frontends to apt-get that make installation as easy as clicking on an icon. It's true that installing something that's not in Debian's repository is more difficult, but it's rare to find any FOSS that's not in Debian already. If you need something that's not there, you're almost definitely geek enough to be able to handle ./config && make && make install.

None of this, of course, applies to proprietary software... but again, if you're installing Oracle you better be able to handle a bash prompt! ;)

Re:Apple helping out

[kelnos]

They have done something that no one else in the *nix world has done: shit-hot gui. People can blather about this and that, but to deny that Apple has created one of the most user-friendly, beautiful, slick gui's for *nix is crazy.

welcome, class, to aesthetics 101. your first lesson: one man's perception of beauty is another's perception of ugliness.

where the OS X gui is concerned, my opinion falls in the latter category. not saying your opinion is invalid, just saying it's a bit arrogant to say your aesthetic sense is absolute truth (or at least the antithesis of crazy).

in all fairness, i don't think aqua is ugly, per se, i'm just not a big fan of the bubbliness and the pinstripiness. the fact that the whole thing is terribly slow on anything but top-of-the-line mac hardware doesn't help either.

Re:Apple helping out

[Anonymous Coward]

Close call! But I have to agree.. #2.

Re:Apple helping out

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually prefer KDE to Apple's GUIs. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

And, goddamnit Apple, if you want some extra credibililty, swallow your pride and supply mice with at least 2 buttons!

Dear Apple haters...

[TheHonestTruth]

From the release notes:

Several bug fixes for POSIX compliance came in from Apple; their assistance is appreciated.

It looks like Apple is giving back to the community, and to a fundamental tool.

To the parent: I'm in the same boat. I thought bash 3?? What is there to add?? Looks like multibyte char support (sorry, I'm are a dum Amer'kin).

-truth

Re:Dear Apple haters...

[Fred Or Alive]

The one thing I find weird with Apple adding stuff to bash is that's Mac OS X's default shell is tcsh. But it is nice of Apple anyway...

Re:Dear Apple haters...

[SlamMan]

They changed that in 10.3

Re:Dear Apple haters...

[Jahf]

Believe it or not, -most- of the large companies that use GPL'ed tools give back to the community.

Apple has done numerous fixes, not just on BASH.

Sun (disclaimer: for whom I work) has done -tons- of work on GNOME, Mozilla and don't forget Open Office (just to name a few).

IBM works on many projects and gives back ... plus contributing all new things like JFS.

All the distro makers like Red Hat, Novell, etc give back tons.

Each of those companies pay engineers to fix pieces not done in Open Source projects as well as to extend them for their customers. The patches are covered under GPL just like the main code, and these companies know it and yet knowingly dedicate serious money and hours to these projects. And then they satisfy the GPL by putting them out on source CDs or submitting them back to the main projects.

The big problem for getting submitted code accepted is that these companies are usually fixing and developing on a codebase that is aging. For instance, Sun did numerous I18N fixes for GNOME 2.6, but by the time they were ready the main GNOME organization had moved on to 2.8. That means there is a disconnect between the two and the changes have to be ported forward before they will hit the main code branch. The same problem can happen with kernel patches and just about any other codebase that changes versions so quickly.

Sorry, you were doing the good thing and pointing out Apple's contributions. But so many people think these companies violate the GPL (in spirit if not in law) when they are very large contributors to open source. Sure, some do, and the community usually find out about it and shame them into minimal compliance (Linksys and Sveasoft come to mind after my delving into alternate WRT54G firmwares last night), but generally speaking the big companies have been a good part of the community.

Re:Dear Apple haters...

[mlk]

> What is there to add??
From the looks of things
rm -rf mlkpr0n{0...4}.png
(and keep mlkpr0n5 up)
history timestamping
And erase dups from histroy.

Yeay, I should upgrade.

Re:Dear Apple haters...

[paco verde]

IBM works on many projects and gives back ... plus contributing all new things like JFS.

err...didn't they just steal that from SCO?

Re:Dear Apple haters...

[planckscale]

Strange because in Apple's implimentation, the 'history' features the usenet post speaks of are not in use. I don't see timestamps, nor could I get HISTCONTROL or erasedups to work. Still, those features seem good to me because I use history all the time.

Re:Dear Apple haters...

[Scarblac]

And that's rather logical, too. Once their fixes have been accepted by the main project, they're automatically ported forward from then on. If they kept them an internal secret, they'd be continously checking them against the latest versions.

Re:Dear Apple haters...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm hoping this will bring true POSIX and even Korn shell compatibility. I've always thought bash was inferior to ksh93 for scripting and way more complicated than tcsh for a user shell. I wonder if the darn thing can read from and write to forked processes like Korn. The previous designation of the -p flag for bash's ``read'' command didn't allow for that. Does anyone know if they corrected that bit of silliness?

Re:Dear Apple haters...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun has done -tons- of work on GNOME

I guess that explains GNOME's lawn-dart trajectory....

Re:Dear Apple haters...

[Jahf]

Which hits on one of the headaches for the big companies doing stuff with open source. You have to either be forward thinking and pay someone to take the time to forward port or you have to spend more money to pay someone (in the long-run) to continuously reapply old patches.

Re:Dear Apple haters...

[Daniel Serodio]

That's called the "stupid tax"

Re:Dear Apple haters...

[pizza_milkshake]

rm -rf mlkpr0n[0-4].png works fine already. of course, that only works for single digit numbers whereas the new ranges work for {0...1000} and {a...z}

Re:Dear Apple haters...

[Jahf]

I guess that explains GNOME's lawn-dart trajectory....

(parent posted anonymouse, score:0)

Ok, I'll go for the bait ...

Actually, Sun has very little say on the strategic direction of GNOME. And if you're referring to changes from GNOME 1.x to 2.x (I can't tell for sure and if so it sure is an old topic to harp on), Sun did not release any 1.x products and had little to nothing to do with their development.

If anything, Sun wishes they had more influence on GNOME's trajectory. They would -love- to have GNOME look more towards Java than Mono (Java openness debate belongs elsewhere and doesn't change Sun's desire in this direction).

Alot of the work Sun does on GNOME is to fix and or finish things that are left in an almost-done state by the rest of the community. Things like Accessibility and Internationalization. Things that alot of the rest of community either takes for granted or is not overly interested in when there are more fun and new things to do, but which are of key importance to GNOME's use and acceptance in the business world.

I'm not saying that Sun does these things out of pure charity, of course not. If Accessibility was completely up to section 508 and if the applications were fully translated into all the Sun supported languages, then surely Sun would spend time/money on other things. But once done these changes benefit the GNOME community as a whole.

Movie Tie-in

[Bistronaut]

They should have called the movie Bourne Again.

Re:Movie Tie-in

[DrWhizBang]

Maybe they might have, if it wasn't based on a book from a series with establisehd names.

Re:Movie Tie-in

[smittyoneeach]

With Blue Öyster Cult on the soundtrack:
"I'm Bournein', I'm Bournein', I'm Bournein' for you..."
OK, that was bad.

Re:Movie Tie-in

[sik0fewl]

No, they shouldn't have *made* the movie. Bourne again would've actually been a better name for the movie because the plot in the movie was nothing like the books (even key characters were somewhat different). I would say "same characters, different story" but even the characters are different.

It's...it's...

[FreemanPatrickHenry]

The Bourne Again and Again and Again Shell! Again!

Re:It's...it's...

[HackLore]

Heh. I've been craving I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again lately. The eurovision pun contest is the best.

Re:It's...it's...

[rlanctot]

Evil Bash!

"Good, bad, I'm the one with the command line..."

er, wait... nevermind.

Hail to the King, baby.

Re:It's...it's...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's the New Zealand version: the baaaaaaa shell.

Re:It's...it's...

[rbolkey]

wow. Ludlum's still publishing even after his death.

Re:It's...it's...

[pjt33]

Bjorn Again SHell - for all terminal-using ABBA fans.

Re:It's...it's...

[bXTr]

The Bourne Again and Again and Again Shell!

No, that would be the Buddhist Shell aka Bush.

Bush in 2004? Er, no thanks.

Re:It's...it's...

[Jesus_666]

Sounds like The Zombie Shell - unfortunately, a zsh already exists.

sco sco sco

[gl4ss]

**b. System-specific changes for: SCO Unix 3.2, Tandem.**

I wonder.

if sco then blowup

and then...

[pb]

...you can go full-circle, and use Cursed GTK!

When are they going to upgrade MY shell?

[g_adams27]

Yeah, Bash 3.0 is great and all, but when are the bash people going to upgrade rbash? Man, I can't do anything with that shell!

Re:When are they going to upgrade MY shell?

[opk]

It's probably not too hard to break out of the restricted shell if you really put your mind to it. I've seen a shell where "command -p sh" would do the job. It isn't that widely used and is rarely used for anything where security really matters. I've never heard of anyone doing a serious study of it. If security matters to you, I wouldn't rely on it.

Re:When are they going to upgrade MY shell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I can't do anything with that shell!

Uh, then don't use it?

Re:When are they going to upgrade MY shell?

[ryanvm]

Insightful? You morons, it's a joke.

Re:When are they going to upgrade MY shell?

[Anonymous Coward]

from rbash list of restrictions:

specifying the -p option to the command builtin command

bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Anonymous Coward]

I seriously hope they've fixed that bag. Since a lot of GNU/LNUX distros don't even ship with a real sh, but symlink to bash. Some random linux bozo makes a #!/bin/sh script thinking it will be portable, but bash (at least 2.x does) forgets to switch off some features when invoked as /bin/sh, so in the end you write a non-portable script. And listen, linux people, /bin/bash is not standard!

Alfred, tired of fixing stupid scripts that assume the whole world has bash in /bin.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Lussarn]

You are probably right about bash being non standard but if you need bash for a script just install bash. It's free software and most probably supported on your platform of choice.

It's not like a vendor lock in or anything like that.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Maybe you have a point about bash extentions versus POSIX sh, but in no sense of the word is bash "proprietary". It is free software! It runs on every unix-like operating system under the sun!

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Anonymous Coward]

/bin/bash is standard on my computer.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Just Some Guy]

You're assuming that the poster has full admin rights on the machine in question. That's the same sort of mindset that causes people to write sh scripts in bash and expect them to work everywhere.

Not meaning to bag on you, but that really is a serious annoyance for people working on non-Linux systems.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Ice_Balrog]

You can install things in your home directory. Honestly, why should we Bash users wait for everyone else? It's not like the writers of those scripts owed it to you to write them your way.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[DrWhizBang]

If you work with Solaris, you know that there is no standard for "/bin/sh". Most unixes ship with a posix compatible "/bin/sh". Solaris, on the other hand, ship the real Bourne shell, thus forcing anyone who wants to write a portable script to get down on their belly and crawl the whole way.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[ArbitraryConstant]

a) You can't assume that everyone, everywhere will have the ability to install the shell of their choice.

b) You can't assume that bash will be in /bin. The BSDs, for example, when they install it out of ports, put it in /usr/bin. This is correct because /bin is for base system files and shouldn't be touched by the user (on a BSD anyway). It's quite possibly mounted read only. It might even be on read only media, or on NFS you can't write to.

just use the more portable
#!/usr/bin/env bash

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[cubidou]

Gee, who do you think you are? You obviously never had to handle a real world situation involving portability of shell scripts. bash is the one breaking the standard, not the contrary.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Just Some Guy]

You can always install Internet Explorer. Honestly, why should we Windows users wait for everyone else? It's not like the writers of those web pages owed it to you to write them your way.

It's all about the standards, my friend.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[upsidedown_duck]

Some random linux bozo makes a #!/bin/sh script thinking it will be portable,...

Probably the best way to write a portable sh script is to take the local man page and the POSIX description of sh and black-line out almost all of the local man page leaving the little snippets that are portable. I've done this before, and what's left over actually is useful and not too suffocating. Then, as the script gets bigger, you still have to do all the conditional mess for all the nice places in /etc or /var a particular file can go, but at least the script syntax is good.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Daniel]

If you're stuck on a proprietary Unix, especially one that's set up poorly (or at least without many development tools), installing bash in your home directory is not trivial. The situation is even worse if you're subject to a quota (been there done that).

Daniel

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Most unixes ship with a posix compatible "/bin/sh". Solaris, on the other hand, ship the real Bourne shell, thus forcing anyone who wants to write a portable script to get down on their belly and crawl the whole way.

or reinvoke with /bin/ksh, Solaris-specifically.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Analogy doesn't hold: Bash runs on operating systems other than Linux, while IE only runs on Windows and MacOS. Come back when Microsoft GPL's Internet Explorer (yeah right).

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Anonymous Coward]

just use the more portable
#!/usr/bin/env bash

Is this actually portable? I've tried looking it up, but failed to find anything pertinent on Google. Does anyone know of any widely used system where env is not found in /usr/bin?

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Scarblac]

It's not like the writers of those scripts owed it to you to write them your way.

If the script starts with '#!/bin/sh', that's the author saying "This here script is written in sh", as far as I'm concerned. From that moment on he owes it to his users to make it work in sh.

If he wanted to make a bash script he should have used /bin/bash.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Just Some Guy]

IE runs under Wine. Bash is at least as difficult to install as Wine+IE in certain Unix environments.

The point is that both needless departures from established standards creative extra grief for end users where none need exist.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[pohl]

Proprietary \Pro*pri"e*ta*ry\, a. [L. proprietarius.]
Belonging, or pertaining, to a proprietor; considered as
property; owned; as, proprietary medicine.
[1913 Webster]

Seems like an odd word to use to describe free software. Try not to lip-sync to the jargon, dude.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[the chao goes mu]

Actually, Solaris sh (on 2.6 - I think. I has been years) was non standard. Try while X do ... done >file. All variables set in the loop have a local scope.Not only non-standard but contrary to their own manpage.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Tore S B]

b) You can't assume that bash will be in /bin

Heck, SGIs put it in /usr/local/gnu/bin/bash or something equally rediculous.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Greg W.]

False analogy. A shell script can be copied to your home dir, and edited so the leading #!/bin/sh says #!/home/kirk/bin/bash instead. You already have to do that with perl scripts that have #!/usr/bin/perl -w instead of #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w or wherever your perl is. It's standard, common practice for sysadmins.

And don't give me "But you can download the web pages and modify them...." A one-line change to the shebang line of a shell script is not analogous to redesigning an entire web site.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[Kourino]

Your problem is with a load of stupid fucking script-wanking morons who can't read SuS specs, not with bash.

Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap

[mikefoley]

I'll probably lose karma for this, but WGAF.

You can even get Bash for (Open)VMS..

http://gnv.sourgeforge.net

Yaawn

[Anonymous Coward]

How come this fails to excite me?

Looks great, but prefer Ash for scripts

[Etcetera]

Looks like a nice Unicode-savvy release that should help with dealing with international languages at the command line. And yay to Apple for giving back (again). When will people finally accept that Apple is indeed helping out the OSS community through GCC, bash, and other tools...?

Kind of off-topic, but for speed purposes in scripts that have to run fast, I find nothing better or more convenient than Ash, especially on systems where /bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/bash.

Does anyone know any history on this shell? Is it a clone of the original bourne shell or of bash? I can't seem to find anything useful on Google ...

Re:Looks great, but prefer Ash for scripts

[mihalis]

As I understand it, ash was written by Kenneth Almquist. I used to see his name on some of the Ada related mailing lists and newsgroups.

Re:Looks great, but prefer Ash for scripts

[Anonymous Coward]

"When will people finally accept that Apple is indeed helping out the OSS community through GCC, bash, and other tools...?"

As I've already said in another post, bash (and GCC come to that) are official GNU projects so this benefits the Free Software Community rather than the OSS community. Of course, the OSS comminity can benefit too because of the liberal nature of the GNU GPL, but improvements to GNU software isn't done for the express purpose of helping the OSS people out.

Re:Looks great, but prefer Ash for scripts

[hackstraw]

Ash is OK, but I've seen it puke/die/ or do something wrong with a very long single quoted text passed as an embedded awk script.

I used to be fairly familiar with ash, and considered being its maintainer, but I did find subtle issues with it that I did not feel like fixing.

If you want a fast /bin/sh, compile your own bash, link it _statically_ (important), and use the ./configure scripts options to strip out the fluff. There might even be a --make-sh-only option or something like that.

I used to roll my onw /bin/sh's, but ever since computers got fast enough, I just took whatever was sitting in /bin.

BTW, any unix system by definition must have a /bin/sh .

Re:Looks great, but prefer Ash for scripts

[cbreaker]

Damn, he had the perfect opportunity to call it KASH and he didn't. Moron.

Re:Looks great, but prefer Ash for scripts

[Stephen Williams]

Ash (or dash, as it's called nowadays) is a Linux port of NetBSD's /bin/sh. It's a POSIX shell with separate lineage from bash.

http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/dash/

It's /bin/sh on my system too. Faster and smaller than bash; watch those configure scripts fly!

-Stephen

Re:Looks great, but prefer Ash for scripts

[spinkham]

I woud argue that the OSS community is a superset that contains as a subset the Free Software Community, and therfore his statement is true.
But that's just my personal opinion.....

Re:Looks great, but prefer Ash for scripts

[Anonymous Coward]

ash is what happens to bash after being bourne again too many times.

Bourne Supremacy

[stoolpigeon]

I can't be the only one who snickers every time I see a commercial for this film. Think Geek used to have a "Bourne Again Believer" t-shirt but I think they dropped it. Maybe I am the only one.

Help me to like bash

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use tcsh (not for shell scripts, just interactively), essentially for a single feature. If someone can tell me how to do this in bash, I might try it again.

If you type a partial command and then press alt-p or esc-p, tcsh pulls up the most recent command in the history that matches what you typed. Not in the "!partialcmd" sense of executing something that matches, but pulling it up for editing on the command line.

Is there a key (or way to get a key) that does that in bash or not?

Re:Help me to like bash

[alyandon]

ctrl-r + type partial command gives similar behavior. Pressing ctrl-r repeatedly steps through matches in the command history.

Re:Help me to like bash

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh... I use tcsh too, and I like that functionality so much I bindkey'd my normal 'up' and 'down' keys to 'history-search-backward' and 'history-search-forward', since they'll still work as normal on an empty line.

Re:Help me to like bash

[Anonymous Coward]

! + type partial command does the same thing.

Re:Help me to like bash

[alyandon]

Not for me. Ctrl-r + command leaves the buffer in an editable state where you can alter the command line. !command simply executes the first match it finds.

POSIX Compliance issues.

[Ashe Tyrael]

There's been an interesting little problem caused for people like Gentoo with the updates in bash 3.0.

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58703

Just a simple move towards compliance breaks most of their scripts, so they've had to patch it out.

Lovely.

Re:POSIX Compliance issues.

[AT]

If you use bash specific features, you should be starting your shell scripts with #!/bin/bash (or #!/usr/bin/bash, depending on the installation path) instead of #!/bin/sh. With bash 3, the former allows the non-POSIX stuff that bash has always allowed, but the latter disallows at least some of it.

Re:POSIX Compliance issues.

[keesh]

It's a problem with autoconf, not with any Gentoo-specific scripts. You're just more likely to see it on Gentoo given how much you end up running autoconf :)

MSH

[Jugalator]

Ha ha, you dorks, use MSH like a man!

I wonder how this will get modded? :-o

Re:MSH

[destinedforgreatness]

oh man

Although still in development, a number of key features of MSH have already been revealed, including: * commandlets all inherit certain options, allowing the user to choose things such as the level of interaction and how to deal with errors - including a "suspend" feature, which allows the user to enter a new command shell, investigate a problem, and then continue with the original command. A simple mechanism is built-in for the programmer to define the prompts to be shown in such circumstances. * options are generally whole words, but can be specified to the minimum number of letters necessarily (e.g. the option -show-detailed-information could be entered as -s if no other option began with 's') * tab completion * the ability to assign the output of a command to a variable, which will then be an object or array of objects inspectable in any way desired

switches? tabs? piped output? way to innovate!

Re:MSH

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave it to M$ to come up with something called "commandlets" ROTFL...I note that it will also feature TAB COMPLETION...and no doubt they'll patent it as well...sheesh...

No doubt millions of M$ idiots will be raving about the new shell in Longhorn that features "commandlets"...ROTFL

Re:MSH

[rehabdoll]

..but does msh run under linux?

Re:MSH

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it's really lack of innovation, and not imitation, that is the sincerest form of flattery?

Re:MSH

[mlk]

I'd guess it would be .NET-based, so maybe.

Re:MSH

[Anonymous Coward]

I note that it will also feature TAB COMPLETION...

Actually that part is a bit weird it's in the article, since it's been in since at least Windows 2000, possibly even back in Windows NT 4 (whoa! do the wave, hehe)

Re:MSH

[archen]

MSH is innovative compaired to many shells, but it also embodies the fact that MS just doesn't GET the Unix phylosophy that makes the shell so powerful. I was sort of dismayed by the fact that bash3 doesn't do much more than bash2 does. But bash really doesn't DO much of anything, and that's the point. It's just an interface to the system. It's all the small programs that you can tie together in bash (or any shell) that makes it powerful.

MS is sort of missing the point here. They are essentially creating a huge programming language that allows you interactivly do tasks on the system. This coupled with the fact that almost all programs on Windows require GUI interaction, and that people using windows more often than not are clueless about a command prompt, and MS making things overly complicated will probably lead to MSH being another windows scripting host.

A shell is a cornerstone in Unix system administration because it is simple and familiar, but still quite powerful and can grow with you. When you turn a shell into a programming language, you've just weeded out a large base of Windows admins who don't want anything too complex. Basically this will probably only end up catering to the more elite Windows admins which is a relativly small percentage =/

Re:MSH

[Tumbleweed]

No way, punk, use DOSSHELL!

Re:MSH

[mpcooke3]

I see your point although the shell in unix is one of the things holding back the switch over to using high level OO based design throughout the system.

Obviously we have to move to high level OO design at some point or will we never be able to keep up in terms of developing linux/bsd.

Sure we can continue to hack around the problem by layering java/mono stuff on top of the base system but as more and more apps (for example once all gnome development) move to high level languages for primary development then bash will not be so useful. We will need something that can interact with objects rather than using strings and pipes.

In a way the fact that string manipulation, pipes and small apps are so powerful it is holding up the next major upgrade of linux/unix systems. Whilst the gnome people realise that moving to a high level language is probably essential in the long run it is going to mean re-writing a lot of C code.

The world moves on. Small apps and pipes are hugely powerful but OO and highlevel language/shells is the future - there is no doubt in my mind.

Re:MSH

[mpcooke3]

Of course I expect microsoft will mess it up somehow :)

Re:MSH

[wobblie]

Shouldn't that be "mshell"? :-)

Re:MSH

[Anonymous Coward]

> Basically this will probably only end up catering
> to the more elite Windows admins which is a
> relativly small percentage =/

Hmm, if it is significantly less than one percent, can you still call that a percentage?

Re:MSH

[HiThere]

So use Python as your shell. It's not difficult. (Mind you, I don't really recommend it, but then I also wouldn't recommend anything as heavy as OO being a part of the shell.)

Re:MSH

[NiceGuyUK]

"...also referred to by the codename Monad"

That so it can be rhymed with Gonad?

Re:MSH

[mpcooke3]

Python is interpreted and most system components are not written in python therefore you can't interact with a lot of stuff in an OO way.

Tab completion / expansion changes

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know if tab completion has been updated?

Specifically, the command-specific changes such as;

mount [press tab]

to see all available mount points (not just the current directory).

I know there are add-ins, though it would be good to know it's always there.

I'm still waiting for...

[misleb]

command.com-3.0. But I guess a more robust cmd.exe would do as well.

Re:I'm still waiting for...

[Anonymous Coward]

cmd.exe

Now *there's* somethning that could be more exciting...

POSIX

[Waffle Iron]

This statement had me a little confused for a while:

Several bug fixes for POSIX compliance came in from Apple; their assistance is appreciated.

Then I looked through the POSIX spec, and sure enough I found this section, which explained things:

POSIX section 23.4.18 (SHELL):

To the extent possible on the terminal hardware, the shell shall present to the user the appearance mimicing a translucent plastic material. The shell rendering material model should incorporate prominent specular highlights suggesting a shiny smooth surface. The shell should cast fuzzy shadows on any user interface elements that lay below it.

I wonder where I can find showtimes for this movie

[Anonymous Coward]

But I'm confused. Isn't this supposed to be the second movie of the trilogy?

Just wondering...

[Kynde]

What is so hot about bash, e.g. compared to zsh?

Seriously, I'm not trying to start a flame war here. This is coming from a really long term zsh user because back when I was just starting unix and linux a fellow bearded unix guru told me something along the lines "go with zsh, it's the best" (thas was about -95). And I've never looked back, but now seing bash being the default shell in most distros I've began to wonder what's going on. Perhaps over the years bash overtook zsh or there are some hidden qualities in bash that I don't know about.

Anyone with some insight on _both_ shells would be greatly appreciated.

Re:Just wondering...

[jandrese]

Bash is so hot because it is the default shell in most Linux installs. Zsh is hidden off somewhere in the package system, so you have to know about it to try it out. Because all of these people who make distros started with Bash, they assume everyone else is using it too and perpetuate the cycle.

It's the same reason IE is still the de-facto browser on the internet, for most people it came with the system. Also, if you jump around on lab machines or on other people's machine, more often than not they don't have zsh installed and you're forced to remember all of the bash syntax anyway. That said, I still use zsh for all of my machines, because the completion engine is smarter and I've got many k worth of .zshrc files built up over the years that I'd hate to have to port over to another shell.

Re:Just wondering...

[opk]

Zsh is still the best.

Bash developers have different priorities.
Bash became the default primarily because it is GNU.
Zsh has some ugly but powerful features like nested expansions. The two areas where bash is better than zsh is multibyte support and POSIX compliance. Much of that was contributed by IBM and Apple respectively. But if you use the shell a lot, you'll find zsh does a lot of things better. The completion is amazing. And when it isn't emulating sh/posix, it fixes some of the broken design decisions (like word splitting of variables) which saves you from doing stupid things.

The FSF actually does development in a very closed manner when it can (the gcc egcs split was partly because of this). Bash is a good example of this. That perhaps a good thing because it is probably good that bash doesn't get some of zsh's nasty (but powerful) features. And if zsh didn't exist, bash might have been forked by now. If you care about your shell, you'll find much more of a community on the zsh lists than the spam filled bug-bash list. You can't even get at alpha releases of bash without being one of the chosen few.

Re:Just wondering...

[DrFatal]

The fact that zsh can't handle multibyte characters correctly was the deciding factor for me, if they ever get around to do it in zsh I might give it a whirl again. bash 2.05b does a good job with my filenames containing utf-8 multibyte characters, so whatever the additions to that code are in 3.0 I'll probably not notice :)

Re:Just wondering...

[upsidedown_duck]

Bash lets you get away with broken things like `export VAR value` that don't carry over to Bourne shell. On the other hand, Bash has a nice vi command-line mode, among other things.

So, from a UI point-of-view, Bash gets high marks. From the "embrace and extend" point-of-view, Bash needs to step back and re-think a few things.

Re:Just wondering...

[ShawnX]

Isn't that what alpha.gnu.org is for? ;)

Re:Just wondering...

[opk]

Try finding an alpha of bash on it.

The FSF have got better but it varies with different programs. Savannah is a big step forward to. But compare GNU projects to many others and you'll find that often they can be a bit more protective of their own toys.

Re:Just wondering...

[Kourino]

You had me willing to try zsh for my next system's default shell until you mentioned multibyte support. Oh, the utter pain in the ass I've gone through with UTF-8 at times ...

Re:Just wondering...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple contributed some changes recently, mostly as a result of their running bash through the Open Group's posix conformance test suites, but the majority of bash's posix compliance was implemented as part of its development.

As for being on the alpha tester list, how about sending mail to the maintainer and asking?

Breaks Gentoo

[Kujah]

Gentoo's various scripts rely on the fact that /bin/sh is usually symlinked to /bin/bash. With 3.0, when invoked as /bin/sh, bash behaves as it should for the first time, which caused some problems. (which are now fixed, by the way)

Re:Breaks Gentoo

[Requiem]

Breaks Gentoo

Seriously? Damn. Ideologically, that's all the reason I need to upgrade!

once upon a time...

[TheHonestTruth]

tsch was the deafult for OS X and for Jaguar I believe, but they moved to bash for Panther.

-truth

Re:once upon a time...

[Fred Or Alive]

Ahh, it must of stuck with tsch because I upgraded from 10.1 to 10.3. I wondered why Apple left the shell partly broken (the autocomplete and command suggesting stuff turned themselves off, I had to do some un-Mac-like textfile hacking to fix it). Not that I'm gonna bother to change myself, it's not worth it with the little command line stuff I do.

Re:once upon a time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct, you are still on tcsh because the update to 10.3 was well-behaved and did not overwrite your NetInfo shell property. You will notice that if you create a new user on your machine, their shell will be bash. Changing the setting is easy -- NetInfo Manager -- but you are probably right that changing your habits and any tcsh scripts you have is not.

Re:once upon a time...

[Short Circuit]

I'm sure there are plenty of people here who will change it for you if you give them your IP address and root access. :)

Re:once upon a time...

[Anonymous Coward]

HAVE! HAVE! MUST HAVE!!!

I hate it when people who can work on a console effectively can't use even simple grammar properly. Verbing may weird language, but wholesale changes in word usage due to laziness are outright stupid.

Re:once upon a time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't get your knickers in a twist, it wasn't intentional. Although my written English isn't exactly the best really.

Could've been worse, you could've seen my handwriting. ;-)

Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?

[dara]

I read the announcement and it mentions "History traversal with arrow keys", but what I would really like doesn't seem to be mentioned (but perhaps it is possible with bash-2.05, I'm not much of a shell expert). In Matlab, the up-arrow key searches the history for commands that match all the characters on the line. No characters and it acts like a normal bash arrow, if "figure, plot" is at the beginning of the line, it will quickly scroll through all plotting commands that have been entered at the shell.

Any idea if this is possible?

Dara Parsavand

Re:Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?

[Atzanteol]

Try 'ctrl+r'. Not *exactly* what you're looking for, but it lets you search through your history.

i.e. on an empty line hit ctrl+r, then start typing.

Re:Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a little used builtin command called fc.
Stands for 'fix command'. RTFM you may find it usefull.

Re:Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?

[Anonymous Coward]

~ -> man fc
No manual entry for fc
~ ->

STFU. You may find it useful.

Re:Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps `set +o vi` will be to your liking.
Switch back by typing `set +o emacs`

Re:Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?

[Anonymous Coward]

For bash builtins (like fc) use the help command while in bash:

BASH$ help fc
fc: fc [-e ename] [-nlr] [first] [last] or fc -s [pat=rep] [cmd] ...

Don't use man like the flameman there suggests :P

Re:Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?

[Anonymous Coward]

cat >> ~/.inputrc
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
^D

Re:Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?

[krabbe]

That's another reason why zsh is preferred by some people. You can do excatly that in zsh by hitting Alt-p.

Re:Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?

[gg3po]

bash# history | grep -E '^ +[0-9]+ +(figure|plot)'
:-)

Re:Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you are,put this in .inputrc:

"\e[6~": history-search-forward
"\e[5~": history-search-backward

and use page-up pagge-down to search

I can live whithout it since 4dos

Re:Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?

[HokieJP]

This really doesn't have the functionality that he wants. It only brings you to the most recent command that started with that text. Suppose you want the 2nd or 3rd most recent, but don't know which?

Re:Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?

[iabervon]

Or use "man bash", which actually explains the builtins. "man bash\n/fc\n/\n/\n" turns up a nice explanation with more detail.

Re:Can arrow key history be like Matlab's?

[4of12]

Speaking of history:

Does anyone have a good solution for how to handle multiple different histories for different terminal windows running bash at the same time?

GUI is good but...

[deadmongrel]

you can't use a GUI interface for ever thing(admin i mean). and switching between tasks is much easier with cli.for remote admin bash+screen+ssh is heaven. agreed. Point and click is easier but not always. I find cli is much easier when doing system administration(example samba, network issues).

Bash isn't Linux

[gorim]

Bash is a portable tool that existed long before Linux did. It is not specific or particular to Linux. So why in the world does this get posted under the category of Linux ?

Re:Bash isn't Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

is that true? I know the Bourne shell and csh
might have but I thought Bash was developed
during linux's existence.

Re:Bash isn't Linux

[gotr00t]

That's true, however, this update affects Linux in a major way, as most distributions ship with bash as the default shell.

Re:Bash isn't Linux

[DrWhizBang]

That's because slashdot users are a bunch of PHRs.

Props to "the mad poster"

(If enough of us use this, it will become part of the vernacular ;-)

Re:Bash isn't Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

The linux community seems to be borrowing tactics from the republicans and hijacking whatever suits their needs. These days the supposed advantages have never really materialized. I think there are still much better solution in the commercial and opensource space. After all linux is just a kernel with all its other bits appropriated from the work of others. my 2p.

Re:Bash isn't Linux

[Cro Magnon]

Because the other OS bash works under is dying!

Re:Bash isn't Linux

[evilviper]

Well, it's not all that bad... In general, Linux distros come with BASH as the default, and all other OSes don't care...

FreeBSD comes with CSH/TCSH, and BASH has to be installed as a port.
OpenBSD comes with KSH, a slightly modified PD-KSH, with "set -o emacs" enabled by default so it acts like BASH out of the box.

Personally, I like KSH very much, and wonder why it doesn't come with any Linux distro. It's something like 1/3rd the size of BASH. And as an added bonus, it doesn't do absolutely brain-dead BASH'isms, like THIS, which has been the #1 BASH annoyance for me, for a long time.

Re:Bash isn't Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand how trends start there Jim...

First of all, they have to be witty or clever, and second of all, the people who start them are usually more esteemed than John Random Slashbot.

Re:Bash isn't Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's your 2p back. It wasn't worth it.

Good news for us...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and unaBASHedly so, if I may say so!

History timestamps!

[straponego]

Bash can now store timestamps in the history and save them to the history file. This alone is worth the upgrade for me. The option to erase duplicates is pretty nice too.

Re:History timestamps!

[sloanster]

Bash can now store timestamps in the history and save them to the history file. This alone is worth the upgrade for me. The option to erase duplicates is pretty nice too.

Awesome - that is a killer feature when you need to find out the exact time that a command was issued... that's the one thing I liked about tcsh - well, now bash does have it all.

Re:History timestamps!

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone actually used the history timestamps yet?
I haven't been able to make this feature work, and I can't account for code present to support it. For example, I don't see where the HISTTIMEFORMAT variable being used in the source code.

Re:History timestamps!

[Anonymous Coward]

For the record, a timestamped history file has been in tcsh for a long time (10 years?) and what was keeping me from switching to a POSIX shell for a while.

But since it was something I felt strongly about, wanted and is relatively easy to do, I added it to my bash debugger project over a year ago. (The ChangeLogs says 2003-05-24). See http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/

The timestamped history was incorporated into bash 3.0 alpha along with my idea of using a user-settable variable to control how to format the time (from strftime()).

Also, most of the debugging support from the above project I think has been encorporated (although I haven't checked it over for a while).

Re:History timestamps!

[Anonymous Coward]

See the documentation at http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/bashref.html#SEC60 I believe though that in contrast to bashdb where this is set by default, Chet had it unset by default, I guess to keep compatible with the old behavior.

Is BASH Linux specific only?

[vivekg]

This story comes under category Linux, wonders why? As we know bash runs under all *nix :)

Re:Is BASH Linux specific only?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Several bug fixes for POSIX compliance came in from Apple"

Re:Is BASH Linux specific only?

[the chao goes mu]

I had it running on Windows as well. Default shell for cygwin.

bash completion getting better

[AT]

The completion ability of bash has been steadily improving. There is a nice script here that sets up a lot of good completion rules for bash.

Re:bash completion getting better

[sjh]

So, you know the person who wrote that uses zsh now...

Really great feature !

[Anonymous Coward]

Guys, I'm really so excited about this. I ran around proclaiming the news about bash-3.0 in my department. Not too many people got excited (I work in Psychology) but check this out: [user@mitral user]$ echo $BASH_VERSION 2.05a.0(1)-release [user@mitral user]$ a | b |cat bash: a: command not found bash: b: command not found [user@mitral user]$ echo $? 0 [user@mitral bash-3.0]$ echo $BASH_VERSION 3.00.0(1)-release [user@mitral bash-3.0]$ set -o pipefail [user@mitral bash-3.0]$ a | b |cat bash: a: command not found bash: b: command not found [user@mitral bash-3.0]$ echo $? 127 Feel the love!

Re:Really great feature !

[pingveno]

What the hell??!!!??? Oh, and why "set-o pipefail"?

Re:Really great feature !

[Lancer]

You missed the AC's point -- bash-2 returned an error code ($?) of 0, or success, in spite of the obvious failure of the pipeline. In bash-3, with pipefail set, $? holds the error code of the pipelined command that failed.

This would obviously be very useful in scripts where the success or failure of a command in the pipleine would not be as determinable as watching it on screen interactively.

Because you are not me

[Just Some Guy]

There's an old saying: "there's no accounting for tastes". Most people take that to mean that you just can't explain why other people like the things they do. Another valid interpretation is that you are not accountable for your tastes, meaning that you don't have to defend your preferences.

You like using a GUI and I like using a terminal. We're two people with two preferred methods of interacting with our machines. Your way is superior - for you. My way is superior - for me. There is no point (or obligation) to argue about which is better, since "better" is not a well-ordered set in this case.

Re:Because you are not me

[sl3xd]

Man if only the world had some more guys like you.

Really great feature !

[Anonymous Coward]

Guys, I'm really so excited about this. I ran around proclaiming the news about bash-3.0 in my department. Not too many people got excited (I work in Psychology) but check this out:

[user@mitral user]$ echo $BASH_VERSION
2.05a.0(1)-release
[user@mitral user]$ a | b |cat
bash: a: command not found
bash: b: command not found
[user@mitral user]$ echo $?
0

[user@mitral bash-3.0]$ echo $BASH_VERSION
3.00.0(1)-release
[user@mitral bash-3.0]$ set -o pipefail
[user@mitral bash-3.0]$ a | b |cat
bash: a: command not found
bash: b: command not found
[user@mitral bash-3.0]$ echo $?
127

Feel the love!

GUI possibilities

[DreadSpoon]

Of course, your problem is that you are assuming that the very nature of a GUI is limited to what you've personally encountered.

Please explain to me what precludes a GUI from offering an advanced search tool, in which you can open up a property info dialog for the results and do bulk permission/property changes for. (Hint: nothing stops this from happening.)

Re:GUI possibilities

[Atzanteol]

Sure, a GUI *can* have an advanced search tool that does what I mentioned.

But what if I want to do:

for i in `cat file.lst`; do wget $i -o - | convert ... ; done

You gonna write a custom GUI app for everything? The nice thing about the command line is that it's "language oriented" rather than "picture oriented." Rather than pointing at what I want and clicking, I tell the computer what I want using a language.

It's the same reason we don't code with a point & click interface (save for VB, but the point and click still only got you so far).

Re:GUI possibilities

[Scarblac]

Please explain to me what precludes a GUI from offering an advanced search tool, in which you can open up a property info dialog for the results and do bulk permission/property changes for. (Hint: nothing stops this from happening.)

What you will end up with is a huge dialog with all kinds of checkboxes and text fields for the same things the command has. Making it more irritating and slower for the purpose of turning it into a shiny GUI, no thanks.

Even if you somehow make a magically really useful GUI widget that makes me enter all the necessary information in a completely natural and quick way and achieve perfection, I cannot believe you can do that automatically for every command ever. Which means there'll be a neat widget for some commands, and the command line for the rest.

That way lies hell. We have a perfectly good command line, thank you. If you want to make GUI frontends, perfectly fine, but don't expect us to use them.

Re:GUI possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Such a GUI already exists! It's called xterm! It does everything any shell can do!

Re:GUI possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

I think one good applicable example is "krename" for KDE. This is a file-renaming tool for KDE which absolutely kicks ass. It's completely GUI driven and can get a little complicated, but it is quite flexible. I use it instead of my shell for giving consistent files names as I like to my mp3 collection.

Check it out here

Re:GUI possibilities

[yuri benjamin]

The difference between CLI and GUI can be described as the following (contrived) shopping example:

GUI - All you can do is "I'll have one of those please" where "one of those" is any item on display.

CLI - You can ask "Do you have any XYZ?", regardless of whether XYZ is on display.

For the GUI, the has to be an icon, widget or menu item somewhere for each task you want to do.

As soon as a GUI adds text fields where you can type a query, it is starting to borrow elements from the CLI.

What I want upgraded...

[sicking]

Now if someone would make a Bush 2.0 release I'd really be exited.

history

[kungfujew]

timestamped history sounds like a useful auditing feature....

Long live "set -o vi"

[Zugot]

GO KSH!

Re:Long live "set -o vi"

[koehn]

Umm, that works in bash too (and has for some time now). The default is emacs mode.

Re:Long live "set -o vi"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's "set -o emacs" for command line recall and vim for editing, thankyouverymuch!

I read this as...

[Stopmotioncleaverman]

...Bush 3.0. I was wondering why the last two incarnations of your US president were so god-awful. ;)

Re:I read this as...

[Tumbleweed]

Well, keep in mind they won't be any good at all until at least v3.1. :)

Re:I read this as...

[shadypalm88]

...Bush 3.0. I was wondering why the last two incarnations of your US president were so god-awful. ;)

Thankfully, in the release announcement, it says Bush 3.0 will include better internationalization support.

(I can only dream!)

Re:I read this as...

[carlmenezes]

Well, the first time, he had no brain and the second time, he was learning how to read :)

Re:I read this as...

[Anonymous Coward]

but for God's sake dont use 'killall': it takes no options, can't be interrupted and really does kill everything.

Re:I read this as...

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

My prediction: Bush 3.0 will be a reality. Jeb Bush will be President, I gather probably in 2012 or 2016.

If I make enough predictions like this, I'm bound to be right at least once! And everyone will forget the ones that did not come true. Look at Nosterdamus. :)

Re:I read this as...

[thumperward]

I for one welcome out new unixy preznit-bashing (ouch) overlords.

- Chris

Hehehe...

[carlmenezes]

yeah...this IS essentially the "Bourne Supremacy" ;) and hopefully the next release will be the "Bourne Ultimate-um" ;)

Er...it's not here!

[dadman]

Can't seems to find it from ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash, ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash, nor from other mirrors.
The most updated version is still 2.05b, not even the patch to 3.0 is available...

Re:Er...it's not here!

[dacarr]

The usenet has the correct links. Do a wget on the links therein and you'll get the tarball.

That was a wild mod ride!

[Just Some Guy]

Man, all I wanted to do was say that I also liked zsh. I didn't think that many people were so wrapped up in their shells.

My post started with +2 (cause I are 1337). Then I got an "Interesting", two "Overrated"s, a "Funny", and most recently a "Flamebait".

Come on, mods: can I have an "Insightful" and an "Underrated", too?

Re:That was a wild mod ride!

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, mods: can I have an "Insightful" and an "Underrated", too?

Ok, whore ;)

Re:That was a wild mod ride!

[David M. Sweeney]

Come on, mods: can I have an "Insightful" and an "Underrated", too?

I've got an "Offtopic" right here for you, pal.

Re:That was a wild mod ride!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:That was a wild mod ride! (Score:0, Offtopic)

I've got an "Offtopic" right here for you, pal.

So it would appear...

That was the whole point.

[devphil]

The plan was to introduce new features in sub-versions like .04a, .05a, .05b. Then let them stabilize. Once the bugs were worked out, that would be 3.0.

As opposed to most open source software, which releases x.0 as soon as it compiles, and only then starts working out the stability bugs.

Re:That was the whole point.

[Bingo Foo]

Defying the convention that major numerical increments are for features and minor numerical increments are for fixes and stability is a bad idea.

You may not think that's the best numbering scheme because in principle stability is more important than features, or whatever, but it is a convention nonetheless, and upgraders and new adopters are conditioned to be cued on those version number changes.

Note that the Linux kernel's "odd-tenths, even tenths" scheme does not alter the fundamental convention, but extends it in a sane and beneficial way.

Re:That was the whole point.

[RWerp]

Note that the Linux kernel's "odd-tenths, even tenths" scheme does not alter the fundamental convention, but extends it in a sane and beneficial way.

Especially the 2.6 kernels...

Re:That was the whole point.

[devphil]

You should probably read the release notes; they explain it better than I did. Bash is not as goofy as you (apprently) think.

It bothers me greatly that you -- and many others -- think that minor version numbers are "tenths". They are not, and have never been. There is absolutely no implication that x.9 is 90% of the way to (x+1).0, and anyone who believes there is has badly misunderstood how software development should proceed. But that's offtopic for this artcle, so I'll stop talking now, cheers.

Re:That was the whole point.

[Bingo Foo]

You misread me, and/or I didn't make my point clearly. I know that numerical operations on version numbers are invalid. Nothing makes sense besides the operations <, >, and ==. Never did I intend to say that (version x) / (version y) = z means that x is z times "better" than y.

Also the only mention of tenths I made was in regard to the Linux kernel numbers, because they have a specific stated policy for their "tenths" version numbering. Another specific convention for versioning was well stated elsewhere in this thread where someone pointed out that integer changes can be expected to break compatibility. Overall, the conventions for versioning are nebulous, but they have become pretty intuitive to those who follow them.

Cursed GTK

[Juan Rey]

Cursed GTK is a text console port of GTK+ ;-)

READ THIS TOO

[Just Some Guy]

I amended the page for DotZshRc to point out that you really need to create both .zshrc and .zshenv from my site to get the full experience. Through this moment, over 200 people have visited the DotZshRc page, but only about 80 have seen DotZshEnv. If you're in the 120-user disjoint, then go back and snag the other one too!

ssh (secure shell)

[essreenim]

is prob. the best : )

The Importance Of Punctuation

[Steve B]

Linux: Bash 3.0 Released

At first glance, I didn't notice the colon and thought Microsoft was rolling out a new FUD campaign.

more colors would be nice...

[bergeron76]

I would absolutely +love+ to be able to have more than 8 ANSI colors in bash. Back in the BBS days, we had EGA adapters that could do 64 colors.

Hell, it would be even better if we could define RRGGBB web-style colors.

THAT would be a very feature to have in my opinion. Does anyone know if this can be done using a VGA adapter? Would we have to do it in framebuffer or something?

Re:more colors would be nice...

[bergeron76]

For those that don't remember, here's a screenshot of EGA text graphics with 64 ascii colors:
http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/al phaman/

Is there anything preventing bash from being able to do this?

Re:more colors would be nice...

[eluusive]

Yeah, the terminal emulators it's running on....

Re:more colors would be nice...

[bergeron76]

But what if you're running it in framebuffer mode right at the console. Are you saying it's the fault of agetty on the terminal?

No BASHing!

[Anonymous Coward]

No bashing old shells, please...

/bin/sh compliant?

[swordgeek]

POSIX compliance is nice, but the Bourne shell itself is NOT POSIX compliant, and won't be made so.

So does bash, invoked as #!/bin/sh, actually behave like /bin/sh?

Re:/bin/sh compliant?

[Cronq]

No, it doesn't. It offers much more features when running as /bin/sh which are abused by users still using #!/bin/sh in their scripts.

Re:/bin/sh compliant?

[swordgeek]

Hmm. Let me rephrase myself then.

Is a bourne shell script guaranteed to run on bash 3.0? Is bash at least a true superset of /bin/sh?

Re:I read this as... bush 3.0

[glsunder]

or in the style of the wizard of oz,
bush 1.0 = lion
bush 2.0 = scarecrow
bush 3.0 = tinman (shudder)

Most? Try 1... and fixed in 40min

[apachetoolbox]

It broke a script in 1 package, and was fixed in about 40minutes. What the hell are you talking about?

chmod a+rX * -R

[Anonymous Coward]

chmod has an intelligent option (uppercase X) to set the execute bit. This sets the execute but only for directories and executables (those which have the x bit set already).

The -R does it recursively.

GNU/FreeBSD in the changelog

[r00t]

Not content to rename Linux, the FSF has
started in on FreeBSD too now.

Re:GNU/FreeBSD in the changelog

[Anonymous Coward]

No no, there really is a GNU/FreeBSD. It's the FreeBSD kernel with GNU userland. It even uses Glibc. Yes, really, someone was pathalogical enough to port Glibc to FreeBSD.

At last count I believe GNU/FreeBSD had somewhere in the region of four, maybe five users.

Re:GNU/FreeBSD in the changelog

[TKinias]

scripsit r00t:

Not content to rename Linux, the FSF has started in on FreeBSD too now.

I suspect that is a reference to the Debian port, which is in fact GNU/FreeBSD -- that is, an implementation of GNU using the FreeBSD kernel...

Re:GNU/FreeBSD in the changelog

[Anonymous Coward]

A flame by Anonymous Coward on Slashdot. Why am I not surprised?

Re:GNU/FreeBSD in the changelog

[buysse]

If I remember correctly, that's actually a Debian project to port a full GNU userland (glibc, etc.) to a FreeBSD kernel. It's not any attempt to rename anything -- it's a way to keep the two systems distinct, because they are very different. There's also a Debian GNU/Hurd.

Re:GNU/FreeBSD in the changelog

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't you know, *BSD is dying?

I want Motif and full compatibility with dtksh

[emil]

If only Novell would release CDE to open source. I would love to have dtksh everywhere.

Re:I want Motif and full compatibility with dtksh

[mattcasters]

Indeed, dtksh is nice.
Actually, I think dtksh is the latest version of the Korn Shell around. Anybody know a more recent version?
I especially like things such as

>all.txt
for ((i=1;i> all.txt
done

It still p*sses me off that such a simple thing can't be done with ksh. (the default shell on many HP-UX/AIX/etc boxes.)
Features like the for loop above are mentioned in O'Reilly's Korn Shell book, but are not present in the version that's mostly available.

0.02

Matt

Re:I want Motif and full compatibility with dtksh

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh? CDE is *Common* to Novell, IBM, Sun, etc. That's why it's called the Common Desktop Environment.

Time to upgrade hardware again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Darn, I just upgraded for Doom 3, but I love the cat food game.

Where can I find the screenshots?

[haskellcompiler]

Many improvements /bugfixes but the same ol'ugly looking black screen...

Some people don't agree.

[emil]

Ash appears to consume large amounts of memory, and some people in BSD circles have serious objections to it.

See the discussion here (scroll down a bit into the postings). I don't have an opinion on the issue one way or another.

Thin line between Geek Humor and being an total as

[Anonymous Coward]

The edges of my mouth were beginning to twitch into a Howard Dean smile, and then you have to call the posters morons. Why don't you give a hint that its meant to be a geeky unix joke? Now it just sounds like elitist posing.

Warning, the above is a sad unix joke!

[xtermin8]

I know its hard to tell, even for people famaliar with rbash; but this is what passes for humor among unix geeks.

Re:Warning, the above is a sad unix joke!

[ElJosho]

I don't consider myself a UMIX geek (yet)... but thanks to the magic of "wtf" I actually got this joke!

joshw@sys1:~> wtf rbash
rbash: rbash (1) - restricted bash, see bash(1)

It's like a Babel fish for Slashdot!

creditting the OS developers

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Maybe they're talking about Linux, the OS?

No shell scripts are really portable!

[Noksagt]

I think only a few would even try to argue that they are. Most shells aren only somewhat available on non *nix OSs & many aren't available ay all off of them. Bash is, at least, reasonably available on most OSs. It is also the de facto shell standard, being found on linux and most newer *nix variants.

Portable shell scripts are probably more impeded when they use tools that aren't part of the shell & which aren't on the target system.

If you want true script portability, it is probably better to use something like perl. If you are concerned with writing short, simple scripts, shell scripts are fine. But not even sh is commonly interperated, & bash is VERY common, so bash isn't really an inappropriate choice.

Re:Thin line between Geek Humor and being an total

[ryanvm]

You moron, I wasn't the original poster.

major numbers for breaking stuff

[r00t]

When you must break compatibility, you increment
the major number. This serves as a warning.

So, if a bash upgrade would break scripts, then
it should get a new major number. This is the case
for some of the POSIX alignment.

Mere features and bug fixes don't deserve a new
major number.

Autocompletion like W2K?

[tstoneman]

I like bash, but the one thing that it doesn't support (out-of-the-box anyway) is auto-completion a la W2K. In NT, when you hit tab, you can cycle through all the words that can complete the letters you typed... on bash, it shows you a list.

Is there a way to make bash behave more like W2K in this sense?

Re:Autocompletion like W2K?

[twistedcubic]

I agree-- it would be interesting to see BASH autocompletion behave like Vim. However, what about when you have a directory with 1000 entries. BASH's behavior seems more appropriate.

Re:Autocompletion like W2K?

[lux55]

Couldn't both be done via TAB and shift-TAB? It's a simple key combo, so I'd prefer to see TAB continue the way it works now, and shift-TAB cycle through the options.

Maybe we should email our suggestions for bash 3.1-dev...

Re:Autocompletion like W2K?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure I understood the windows behavior.. but try this in /etc/inputrc or equivalent:

C-a: history-search-backward

then type what you want and press control-a to complete, and repeat to cycle through older completions

Re:Autocompletion like W2K?

[Bake]

I hope not, cmd.exe's autocompletion annoys me to no end!

That and cmd.exe's paging through command history.

Re:Autocompletion like W2K?

[Anonymous Coward]

"\t": menu-complete
"\e[Z": "\M--\t"

Re:Autocompletion like W2K?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bind something (like TAB, or shift-TAB if it outputs a distinct key sequence) to `menu-complete'.

Re:Autocompletion like W2K?

[value_added]

Personally, I think that approach is somewhere between idiotic and annoying, but using

$ cat /etc/h*[Tab][Esc]=

will present you with a list of completions for /etc/h* without interrupting the completion.

It isn't and neither is the topic

[trashme]

You're speaking in half-truths.

The top catagory for this story is Announcements. It is also listed under the following catagories: GNU, Operating Systems, Unix, and lastly Linux.

Re:It isn't and neither is the topic

[Bullet-Dodger]

Yes, well, it's in the Linux section. Speaking of, is this the first story actually posted here? With the other stories in this section added retroactively? I can't remember ever seeing this or the IT one before.

It doesn't break Gentoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

It exposes that Gentoo is broken. There is a difference.

Re:It doesn't break Gentoo...

[bender647]

Any good slackware user knows you write your rc scripts for ash, the lowest-common denominator. Not every user installs bash!

Re:It doesn't break Gentoo...

[pyite]

Seriously, that is a stupid mistake on Gentoo's part. The least they could have done is #!/bin/bash instead of calling a might be, might not be, symlink.

Wow!

[rd_syringe]

Windows XP users everywhere are amazed! 127!

Obligatory Everything Else plug

[bheerssen]

urpmi package
emerge package
installpkg package

What others have I forgotten? Just about every modern distro has a cool, easy to use package installer. But when that fails, there's always the old fashioned way: ./configure
make
make install

Bash 4DOS Directory without CD

[taradfong]

Remember 4DOS? They had this great feature: if you typed a directory all by itself on a command line, it would jump to that directory. It saved you typing all that cd nonsense. When you think about it, this makes sense as there is never (at least that I can think of) any other case where just typing a directory does anything else. I mean, why type...

[user@server somedir]$ cd /etc/rc.d/rc0.d/

...when you could type...

[user@server somedir]$ /etc/rc.d/rc0.d/

It always surprised me that no one implemented this in bash, and finally I got around to doing it myself. It's a very simply change to only one file. My patch is to 2.05b - will have to do the 3.0 patch soon.

http://mattwalsh.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/BashDirec toryJumpPatch/

The one 'hole' is that command completion is a bit weird for the first element of a directory...if you have a directory that starts with 'ls', and you type ls <TAB> it will complete with 'ls'. Still, I find it to be very useful.

Re:Bash 4DOS Directory without CD

[hc00jw]

Urrgghh... No! I often want to do something quickly in some other directory, but without physically moving directory (the current directory is where I do *most* of my work). This way, all the commands in the history I have typed out are use relative paths are still relevant, and when I come back to it from some other terminal session, I don't wonder where I am, because I haven't been jumping around all over the place!

If I want to change directory, I will explicitly say so!

Re:Bash 4DOS Directory without CD

[Anonymous Coward]

I would think that by typing ONLY the directory name on the command line, that IS explicitly stating that you want to change the current directory.

But hey, that's just me.

Bash 3.0

[cygnus]

leave 3.0 alone! >:(

Better command completion from history

[wowbagger]

What I would like to see Bash do is command completion a la 4DOS:

If I have a command
foo bar baz

in my history, and I type
foo<TAB>

It complete that with the most recent command starting with "foo", and if I type
foo<UP>
it will cycle through the commands in history that start with "foo".

Re:Better command completion from history

[OldMiner]

Type 'Ctrl-R' (prompt changes to read "(reverse-i-search) `':"). Type 'foo'. If this is not the foo you want, hit Ctrl-R again to find the next match.

It's amazing how many complaints people have about their favorite shells and editors which are actually already accounted for. One just needs to take the time to read the documentation once.

Re:Better command completion from history

[wowbagger]

Typing "foo" is a lot easier than CTRL-R - one keystroke rather than a combinded stroke.

Typing "foo<UP><UP>" is a lot faster when I have multiple commands in the history, as well.

zoid

[Anonymous Coward]

zoidberg!

Re:zoid

[pardus]

My compliments for the quick post :) For everybody wondering what the post meant, see http://zoidberg.sf.net

Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian unstable has had this for _hours_ !

Of course, I was a bit puzzled when I couldn't find any mention of it on the GNU site....

(posted anon because I already modded)

bash is written by Linus?

[chaoskitty]

"Linux: Bash 3.0 Released", in the slashdot Linux section - does anyone notice anything wrong with this?

Linus did not write bash. bash is a GNU project. Come on, people - it's one thing to not worry about calling Linux OSes GNU/Linux, but it's another to attribute credit to a completely unrelated party!

pry my ksh from my COLD DEAD HANDS!

[chegosaurus]

Does bash have "r" yet? Or has it always and I've just never found it? I don't want stupid csh "!" to repeat my commands.

And I set up bash so I can, for instance, move from rc2.d to rc3.d by typing

$ cd 2 3

?

Re:pry my ksh from my COLD DEAD HANDS!

[Anonymous Coward]

r is the same as (and in ksh is an alias for) `fc -s'.

Look at examples/functions/kshenv for ksh compatibility functions. Look at ksh-cd in that directory for a ksh-like cd function.

Re:pry my ksh from my COLD DEAD HANDS!

[chegosaurus]

Cool. Thanks. I usually just stick ksh93 on the linux machines I use, so I haven't really looked in to heavily customising bash. But recently I got badly bitten by a bug in ksh93's array handling, so maybe it's a good time to give bash another go.

Tish...

[Hortensia Patel]

The FSF actually does development in a very closed manner when it can (the gcc egcs split was partly because of this)

..and pshaw. egcs was a radical rewrite of GCC; it was run as a separate research project in order to be able to make huge changes and get releases out for testing without blocking bugfix work on the old, stable codebase. (Since radical rewrites tend to be high-risk.)

I've never heard that any kind of "openness" issue was involved.

Re:Tish...

[opk]

Maybe I'm thinking of something else like pgcc then. I read something about it once but it was a while ago. Perhaps it was just other misinformed slashdot posts.

In the case of bash, it is a valid point though.

Get real, "wsh" is where it's at!

[Anonymous Coward]

*nix weenies can only wish they had the power and functionality of the mighty Windows' wsh!!!

RPM

[dacarr]

Curiousity - anyone know if there's an RPM yet available?

Re:RPM

[Anonymous Coward]

I just got one via yum for Fedora Core 3 Test 1

Try using a "CD replacement" like WCD instead...

[Richard Steiner]

This CD command replacement acts much like the well-known ACD utility used to under DOS -- it allows the user to move to a subdirectory even if only part of that subdirectory name is entered (regardless of its position in the tree), it shows an interactive picklist of options if more than one subdirectory matches the entered string, and it also provides a nice ncurses-bases interactive interface for traversing the directory tree in a visual manner.

Information, source, and binaries for various OSes can be obtained here:

WCD Wherever Change Directory

Try adding the following to ~/.inputrc

[Richard Steiner]

Add the following two lines to the .inputrc file in your home directory (or create it if it doesn't exist):

"\M-[A":history-search-backward
"\M-[B":history -search-forward

That produces 4DOS-like command history behavior, at least on my box (Mandrake 8.2).

Just have to bind it to a key

[ooloogi]

in my /etc/inputrc (or ~/.inputrc) I have:

"\e[18~": history-search-forward
"\e[19~": history-search-backward

Which does a MS style (shudder) history search on F8 and F7 - it sounds like it does exactly as you mention. With a change of escape code, you could adjust the key binding.

Annoyance can probably be fixed

[meowsqueak]

I take it you're showing how sometimes backspacing or moving the cursor backwards along a line that exceeds the terminal's width does a strange duplication thing, making it almost impossible to edit? In my own experience, there are two main reasons why this might happen:

1. you changed the *term window size while constructing the command, so use this to enable checks for this condition: shopt -s checkwinsize

2. you have an improperly terminated escape code in your prompt. I had this problem until I started using codes like this: \[\e[0m\] rather than the other style, which I now forget.

Re:Annoyance can probably be fixed

[evilviper]

Actually, I don't believe either is the case. The attempt to help is appreciated none-the-less.

1. Not something I do, yet I've had this same problem many times. However, I will set that option in my profile, in hopes it may help.

2. Very unlikely... I'm using bash's default profile script, and it appears to be very throughly escaped.

wrong way around

[ooloogi]

W2K style is a real pain, and to me it seems worth installing a few hundred MB of cygwin to get the bash behaviour! I'd be more interested in knowing how to get Bash behaviour in W2K. Any ideas?

It's not necessary to start on an empty line [n/t]

[piranha(jpl)]

It's not necessary to start on an empty line.

Hence error *codes*

[meowsqueak]

This is why error messages in any language should be accompanied by an error code (usually numerical but it doesn't have to be) that is unique to the root cause of the error. Then you can search on this error code regardless of the language of the message.

Re:Hence error *codes*

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because numbers are written identically in all languages.

Re:Hence error *codes*

[meowsqueak]

No need to be sarcastic. I specifically mentioned it doesn't have to be numbers. You obviously missed my point - it should be something unique to the root cause and by implication of the context of this discussion, easily *web-searchable*. Even if it was 'english' (hindu-arabic?) numerals, it's not there for reading, it's there for indexing.

Re:Hence error *codes*

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

(offtopic)
I always heard them as 'arabic numerals' in school, but their roots are hindu.
(more on topic)

I fully agree with you, and above that I believe they should be done the same way standard services do it -- Look at http:

5xx: Server error.
4xx: Client error(sort of. eg, entered wrong filename).
3xx: I don't even remember..
2xx: Profit! or success.

That way you can easily look at the number, see the first digit and classify it, then just check a man page or two.

Or you could do them like microsoft which is much less immediately useful, but gets around the problem the SA(sarcastic asshole) mentioned: just display the numbers in hex. 0xC2A076B or whatever.

It's still not

[nusratt]

zsh

Actually ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... real geeks spend more time playing with the one-line shell script than gawking at the porn.

(Just waiting for a language war to break out ... Perl beats the crap out of sh for stuff like this!)

Solaris and bash....

[jotaeleemeese]

my-machine $uname -sr
SunOS 5.8
my-machine $which bash
/usr/bin/bash
my-machine $pkginfo -l SUNWbash
PKGINST: SUNWbash
NAME: GNU Bourne-Again shell (bash)
CATEGORY: system
ARCH: sparc
VERSION: 11.8.0,REV=2000.01.08.18.12
BASEDIR: /
VENDOR: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
DESC: GNU Bourne-Again shell (bash)
PSTAMP: humbolt20000108182543
INSTDATE: May 28 2002 10:30
HOTLINE: Please contact your local service provider
STATUS: completely installed
FILES: 7 installed pathnames
5 shared pathnames
5 directories
1 executables
1399 blocks used (approx)

not that I use it, I prefer efficent shells *cough *ksh*cough*

Re:Solaris and bash....

[Anonymous Coward]

Kornhole shell sucks. The fact that you have to do a "set -o vi" to get any history functions is a testament to that, but what's the real killer is that NOBODY in their right mind uses it for shell scripts.

Re:Solaris and bash....

[evilviper]

the real killer is that NOBODY in their right mind uses it for shell scripts.

On the contrary. Many, many people use ksh for scripting. I do myself, and I've contributed many quite complex scripts.

KSH was the originator of all the functions everyone currently expects from shells. Bash doesn't have ANYTHING that KSH didn't, nor anything that PD-KSH doesn't.

As for history functions, you just need to create a simple config file. You don't need to do so for bash, only because it comes with one. In addition, OpenBSD's version has history enabled by default. And "set -o emacs" would be preferable for most people, esp. those switching from bash.

Debugging support in BASH 3.0 (Was Re:Neat )

[Anonymous Coward]

Although it is extremely hard to ascertain from the change list and burried amongst the esoteric-sounding syntax changes, bash for the first time has enough of the internal changes from http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/ to support a real debugger.

By "real debugger" I mean something that can be used to reliably debug 10,000-line "configure" scripts and debug around control flow, handle sourcing multiple files, show a call stack, debug into or skip over into functions.

Bush 3.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Not another one.

Maybe someone will do a KDE port

[cbreaker]

.. and call it Kenity.