Linux – Comparison of Unix shells

linuxshellunix

Of the major Unix shells (bash, ksh, tcsh, zsh, others?), are there any compelling reasons to use one over another?

Which is the most interactive/command-line friendly?
Which is the most conducive/intuitive for writing scripts?
Are there any major built-in features that one shell offers that others don't?
Are any of these shells really good for one type of function, but not another? Or are they all pretty well-rounded/flexible?
Is it just a matter of personal preference?

I can make this community wiki if anyone prefers.

Best Answer

Current:

bash — Bourne again shell, default shell in most Linux distributions. Decent features;
zsh — the most feature rich, but still rarely used;
ksh — default shell in Solaris, AIX and other few other unices;
tcsh — default shell in various *BSD flavor unices;

Historic:

sh — original Bourne shell (released 1977). Obsoleted by bash;
csh — original C shell (released 1978). Obsoleted by tcsh and ksh;

Note, that bash, ksh and zsh derive from sh syntax, while tcsh derives from csh syntax. This are two quite different syntaxes.

The feature chart (wiki).

Related Solutions

Bash – Unique Features of bash compared to zsh

zsh is for vulcans. ;-)

Seriously: bash 4.0 has some features previously only found in zsh, like ** globbing:

% ls /usr/src/**/Makefile

is equivalent to:

% find /usr/src -name "Makefile"

but obviously more powerful.

In my experience bash's programmable completion performs a bit better than zsh's, at least for some cases (completing debian packages for aptitude for example).

bash has Alt + . to insert !$

zsh has expansion of all variables, so you can use e.g.



% rm !$<Tab>


for this. zsh can also expand a command in backtics, so

% cat `echo blubb | sed 's/u/a/'`<Tab>


yields

% cat blabb


I find it very useful to expand rm *, as you can see what would be removed and can maybe remove one or two files from the commmand to prevent them from being deleted.

Also nice: using the output from commands for other commands that do not read from stdin but expect a filename:

% diff <(sort foo) <(sort bar)


From what I read bash-completion also supports completing remote filenames over ssh if you use ssh-agent, which used to be a good reason to switch to zsh.

Aliases in zsh can be defined to work on the whole line instead of just at the beginning:

% alias -g ...="../.."
% cd ...

Linux – Most common Unix/Linux shell

For Linux i'd say bash, while I see that classical Unix variants seem to prefer csh.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Unique Features of bash compared to zsh

Linux – Most common Unix/Linux shell

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