Switched to Bash and Comparison of Shells

[Malcolm Kay]

On Fri, 11 Jun 2010 02:49 am, Dan D Niles wrote:
> I had been using csh/tcsh for 20 years and I just switched to
> bash.  The recent discussion about the differences between the
> shells prompted me to take another look at bash.  I thought
> I'd share my perception of the differences between tcsh and
> bash.

It seems to me that it is a little late in the day to be changing
to bash. Some well known Linux distributions are beginning to see 
that some non-posix features of bash can create difficulties. I 
believe recent releases of Ubuntu use dash as the prefered 
shell, and it looks as though Debian will be going the same way.
Dash is supposed to be a modern, faster and cleaner 
implementation of sh -- if installed through FBSD ports it has 
the same man page as sh.

>
> The big thing tcsh is lacking, and the reason I switched, is
> the lack of sensible redirection (as some call it). 
> Specifically, not being able to do 'command 2>/dev/null
> >/somefile' is why I switched.

I'm also a long time csh/tcsh user (somewhat more than 20 years)
and freely admit that redirection at the command line can 
occassionally be a problem. I've always used sh for any serious
scripting.

Unless you wish to play with one or other fairly common but 
lesser known shells such as zsh or ksh then I would suggest that
sh or dash (perhaps with a -E or -V option for interactive use) 
would be more appropriate than bash in a modern OS.

But ultimately each to his own.

Good luck,

Malcolm