From owner-freebsd-chat Wed Jul 28 1:53: 3 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from flood.ping.uio.no (flood.ping.uio.no [129.240.78.31]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DA7B51523E for ; Wed, 28 Jul 1999 01:52:58 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from des@flood.ping.uio.no) Received: (from des@localhost) by flood.ping.uio.no (8.9.3/8.9.1) id KAA67748; Wed, 28 Jul 1999 10:52:51 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from des) To: Doug Cc: Dag-Erling Smorgrav , chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What to tell to Linux-centric people?! References: From: Dag-Erling Smorgrav Date: 28 Jul 1999 10:52:50 +0200 In-Reply-To: Doug's message of "Tue, 27 Jul 1999 13:00:17 -0700 (PDT)" Message-ID: Lines: 41 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.5/Emacs 19.34 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Doug writes: > On 27 Jul 1999, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: > > > Len Huppe writes: > > > As a newcomer to FreeBSD, I am intersted in knowing why so many of you > > > *hate* bash. > > > > It's buggy > > How and where? Most prominently, it suffers from the same globbing bugs (well, they're documented, so I guess they're features now) as every other Bourne shell out there (specifically, if no files match a given pattern, the pattern is left unexpanded. Real Shells [tm] issue an error.) > What features specifically do you recommend that we look at other > than those two, and how do they differ from bash? I'm willing to give > another shell a look, but "Use this, it's better" isn't a convincing > argument for me. :) Better scripting contructs. Multiple selectable scripting syntaxes (even csh syntax, if you absolutely must). Built-in test with -nt, -ot etc. operators (like NetBSD's test(1)). Advanced variable expansion. Very advanced globbing, which includes selecting files based on their types, selecting only part of the names of the selected files, excluding files which match a specific pattern, etc. Programmable completion which can for instance be configured to complete arguments to common commands, e.g. package names for pkg_info or pkg_delete, CVS commands for cvs, user names for chown. More flexible prompt. A startup script sequence you can actually understand (why the h* won't bash read .bashrc if the shell is a login shell?). A large number of options which allow one to fine-tune completion behaviour, scripting syntax, globbing behaviour, and bug compatibility with other shells. Autoloading of functions when they're invoked. Builtin scheduler. Tons of other stuff. DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@flood.ping.uio.no To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message