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Agreed,
not everyone is using the BASH shell. Shells, like operating
systems are a religious thing.
Bash
is the shell, or command language interpreter, that will
appear in the GNU operating system (if it ever will be released).
Bash is an sh-compatible shell that incorporates useful
features from the Korn shell (ksh) and C shell (csh). It
is intended to conform to the IEEE POSIX P1003.2/ISO 9945.2
Shell and Tools standard. It offers functional improvements
over sh for both programming and interactive use. In addition,
most sh scripts can be run by Bash without modification.
The linux operating system
uses the bash shell as its default shell. This is a public
domain shell written by the Free Software Foundation under
their GNU initiative.
Ultimately
it is intended to be a full implementation of the IEEE Posix
Shell and Tools specification. This shell is widely used
within the academic community.
The improvements offered by BASH include:
Command line editing (Emacs
and
vi mode)
Unlimited size command history
Job Control
Shell Functions and Aliases
Indexed arrays of unlimited size
Integer arithmetic in any base from two to sixty-four
I
have been using the Bourne and Korn Shell for several years
but when the linux thing started I almost immediately switched
to the BASH. I really like the history and command line editing
features. You can grab a copy of my bash config files from
here
Summary
of shell facilities
| |
Bourne |
C |
TC |
Korn |
BASH |
| command
alias |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| shell
scripts |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| filename
completion |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| command
line editing |
No |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| job
control |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| command
history |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Download
the bash and other GNU stuff from the complete GNU archive
at ftp.sbs.de/pub/gnu
There
is a book by O'Reilly about the BASH shell. Look
here for details.
The
"Absolute Bash Scripting Page" is here
Last
update by Hermann Heimhardt
on April 3, 2002
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