Command Shells - The Quirks, The Pros and The Cons

OctaneZ asks "I am not trying to start a flame war here, but I would personally be very interested in seeing an analysis, both pros and cons, of all of the common shells: bourne, bash, csh, tcsh, and korn. I understand that a lot of linux users swear by bash because it is the default, but they all have there own "personalities" what does everyone think?" Interesting question. I'd be interested in hearing why some folks prefer csh over bash.

Comments

bash, bourne, ksh, csh

[josepha48]

I have tried some of the different shells. Here is my review.

csh: This is used as the default shell on AIX. It has some newt features like ! and !! which allow a user to automajically execute a command in the history. Bash also support shis. In fact most of what csh can do bash can do to. I often find myself usinjg csh commands in bash as I work on an AIX server machine at work. csh uses setenv where bash uses export

ksh: or korn. I hate the name core shell it makes me think of something that wel .. it allows one to set up a command line editor. If you like vi you can have a vi on the command line sort of feeling.

bourne: I believe the bourne shell is used on the BSD's. I did try freebsd once and believe that I was using bournce shell. I found it primative compaared to bash. There was a greater learning curve. There seemed to be more to setup, but that could have been FreeBSD itself. There was a history, but I was not sure hw to access it.

Now bash: bash allows one to use ther arrow keys tonavigate thru the history to make executing commands easier. However this is not the only way to execute the history, one can the ! or !! (!69 will execute teh 69 th command in the history file). both ksh and bash use sthe export command to set envariables. I also believe that you can set vi as your command line editor to execute vi commands in the bash shell. To me bash is more like DOS, and thus you do not deal with the quirks of a command shell as much as you deal with the learning the unix commands, thus it is easier to use.

just muy .02 cents. I am sure that others have there opinions. So send flames > /dev/null and moderate -1G

send flames > /dev/null