What do you advice for shell usage?

  • Do you use bash? If not, which one do you use? zsh, fish? Why do you do it?
  • Do you write #!/bin/bash or #!/bin/sh? Do you write fish exclusive scripts?
  • Do you have two folders, one for proven commands and one for experimental?
  • Do you publish/ share those commands?
  • Do you sync the folder between your server and your workstation?
  • What should’ve people told you what to do/ use?
  • good practice?
  • general advice?
  • is it bad practice to create a handful of commands like podup and poddown that replace podman compose up -d and podman compose down or podlog as podman logs -f --tail 20 $1 or podenter for podman exec -it "$1" /bin/sh?

Background

I started bookmarking every somewhat useful website. Whenever I search for something for a second time, it’ll popup as the first search result. I often search for the same linux commands as well. When I moved to atomic Fedora, I had to search for rpm-ostree (POV: it was a horrible command for me, as a new user, to remember) or sudo ostree admin pin 0. Usually, I bookmark the website and can get back to it. One day, I started putting everything into a .bashrc file. Sooner rather than later I discovered that I could simply add ~/bin to my $PATH variable and put many useful scripts or commands into it.

For the most part I simply used bash. I knew that you could somehow extend it but I never did. Recently, I switched to fish because it has tab completion. It is awesome and I should’ve had completion years ago. This is a game changer for me.

I hated that bash would write the whole path and I was annoyed by it. I added PS1="$ " to my ~/.bashrc file. When I need to know the path, I simply type pwd. Recently, I found starship which has themes and adds another line just for the path. It colorizes the output and highlights whenever I’m in a toolbox/distrobox. It is awesome.

  • gnuhaut
    2·
    9 months ago

    Btw, if you ever wondered why Debian uses dash as /bin/sh (the switch was a bit annoying at the time), I think the reasoning was something like this:

    • dash is a bit faster, which might have saved a second or two on boot times (this was before systemd). Same applies to compilation times, configure scripts run faster with dash.
    • A bunch of #!/bin/sh scripts in Debian did not actually work if you replaced /bin/sh with another shell, which I guess some people wanted to do. Making dash the default /bin/sh forced everyone to fix their scripts.

    Also some history on the abomination that is m4sh, famously used by GNU autoconf configure.ac scripts. Apparently when autoconf was released in 1991, there were still some Unix systems that shipped some 70s shells as the default /bin/sh. These shells do not support shell functions, which makes creating any sort of shell programming library pretty much impossible (I guess you could make a folder full of scripts instead of functions). They decided to use m4 preprocessor macros instead, as a sort of poor man’s replacement for functions.

    In hindsight, it wish they had told commercial Unix sysadmins to install a proper /bin/sh or gtfo. But the GNU people thought it was important to make it as easy as possible to install free software even on commercial Unices.