[aklug] Re: bash sucks

On Thu, 2 Feb 2012, Christopher Howard wrote:

> I'm just tired of bash... such weird, ugly syntax, and it's boring to
> be doing the same thing as everybody else. Switched my default shell
> over to tcsh - heard it had some nice C-like syntax. Took me a few
> google searches to figure out persistent history
> <http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070715091413640> but
> otherwise I haven't had any trouble yet. Tomorrow I'll try writing
> some new backup scripts.
>
> Any other non-conformists out there?

All shells suck for any real programming, and they're all generally
sufficient for scripting. I'll take bash over the Bourne shell or csh.
I wrote bondctl (http://freecode.com/projects/bondctl) to be ash compatible
so it'd run in a busybox-based initramfs environment, and still work via
bash on a full system.

End sum, while tcsh is definitely an improvement over csh (and Korn is
better than Bourne), I'm not sure I care enough to be bound to one shell.
In general, if you care about portability you're going to end up being
limited to Bourne or csh, anyway.

Yes, I'm so boring I don't even care about being boring. I just want
something that works across as many OS'es as possible. Choosing a language
implementation for the challenge is cool. Choosing a language based on
technical merits is logical. Choosing a language to protest what others
are doing is... pointless.

:-) I'm too old and too pragmatic to care... No offense. Don't let the
man^H^H^Hshell keep you down! ;-)

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Fri Feb 3 00:44:13 2012