Default shell in Panther 7B21?

[orangefoodie]

Is it just me, or is the default shell in Panther 7B21 now bash?! My painfully edited .tcshrc files dun work anymore

But what a great build! Even the setup screen blows me away. Now if only Firebird and Fink worked under it...

 

[Nermal]

I heard that they've changed it to bash, but I don't have Panther so can't confirm this. Personally I don't even know what the difference is!

 

[sparkleytone]

yep its bash now. my setup doesnt work anymore either, but most of what i had in there was just to make it somewhat similar to the bash i had been used to in linux. i have no idea whether or not its going to stay the default.

 

[simX]

Anyone know why they changed it and/or what the benefits of bash are over tcsh (and perhaps the disadvantages?). I'd be interested in knowing.

 

[Daveman Deluxe]

I remember reading in Unix for Dummies that the csh shell sucks, but the authors didn't care to get into it.

Somebody that's a lot geekier than I can explain the difference though, since I don't know the difference. For my purposes, the only difference is in the prompt.

 

[daveL]

Well, yes, the Panther default is now bash. Big deal. If you don't like it, start up 'netinfo' in your utilities folder and change the shell in your user entry. They haven't removed tcsh from the system, it's just not the default anymore.

Shells are a religous issue; it just depends on what you are used to. If you have a BSD background, you're probably more used to tcsh/csh. If your a System V weenie, you're likely to be a korn shell (ksh) type. If you're a masochist, you probably still use the bourne shell (sh, although it's usually aliased to ksh or bash these days). Bash is the GNU shell that is sh/ksh-like, plus a bit of csh, plus some additions. Generally, bash will run sh/ksh scripts with little or no modifications and provides the command line editing, history and alias features provided in ksh. Try it, you'll like it.

 

[Powerbook G5]

Forgive the possibly stupid question...are commands different now or do we type them the same to do stuff like the weekly/monthly maintainence and such?

 

[daveL]

Originally posted by Powerbook G5
Forgive the possibly stupid question...are commands different now or do we type them the same to do stuff like the weekly/monthly maintainence and such?

The commands should be the same, regardless of what shell you are using on the command line. If the scripts you run are implemented with a different shell, that shell will be "forked" and execute the script. Every script, if it is written correctly, will have as its first line like:

#!/bin/tcsh

or

#!/bin/sh

or

#!/bin/perl

You get the idea. The script itself defines what command interpreter to use to execute it.

HTH

 

[Powerbook G5]

Cool, thanks. I don't know a great deal about Unix, as you can tell.

 

[Gelfin]

Originally posted by Daveman Deluxe
I remember reading in Unix for Dummies that the csh shell sucks, but the authors didn't care to get into it.

Matter of opinion and experience. There are three major families of shells, the Bourne Shell (/bin/sh), the Korn Shell (ksh, not present on OS X), and the C Shell (/bin/csh). If I recall correctly, ksh was or still is a licensed product, which is why it's less common.

The Bourne Shell is regarded as kind of a common denominator. If you want a script that runs on as many systems as possible, assume it will be run through /bin/sh. The C Shell is designed so that scripts will make more sense from the perspective of C programmers. The Bourne Again Shell (bash) is an enhanced Bourne Shell much in the same way that tcsh is an enhanced csh.

Early Linux distributions actually used tcsh by default, mostly because bash didn't really exist as such at the time.

At risk of sounding like I'm flaming folks (which I'm not), the view that bash is the only "real" shell and that everything else sucks is usually propagated by Linux geeks who have never touched a non-Linux system, and thus don't really realize that Linux has some really huge peculiarities in comparison to most Unix systems.

 

[orangefoodie]

Actually, the reason I brought this up was that I was always confused as to why Jaguar defaulted to tcsh in the Terminal but remained bash in Single-user mode. I guess now there's some consistency, no?