Shell Games

[Tom Huppi]

On Fri, 31 Dec 2004, Nicolas Mackintosh wrote:

<snip>

> I've always looked at the shell as a very personal thing. Some will
> prefer Bash, others will want to play with something completely
> different. It's a bit like having a favorite hammer... Only a lot more
> elegant!

Heh...you have not seen my work then :)

My two cents, though:  I started out in a multi-platform
environment and thus choose Bourne Shell for scripting (and still
had to learn the sed, awk, etc differences since most shells are
pretty useless alone.)  As time goes by, I suspect it's less of an
issue even for the few folks who find themselves in such a
position.  I will mention, though, that knowing Bourne Shell and
portability issues can come in handy for working with autoconf,
and that is likely a more common demand these days.

FWIW, I've always used 'tcsh' interactively, but almost switched a
while back out of disgust at not being able to figure out how to
get a one-line foreach/{do_something}/end loop (which would allow
me to re-run a complex command easily.)

Thanks,

 - Tom