On The Subject Of Holy Wars...

[BlueLines]

The editor battle is already over at our work (Xemacs is the champion), but we're treading on new holy war ground. Some here use bash, and some use tcsh. This causes many nightmares for shell script writers, as some refuse to install the shell which they don't run. Or they may (in the case of my boss) have a binary named "bash" and "/bin/sh" which are both just copies of tcsh. Ughhh...

BlueLines

Disclaimer: This post may contain inaccurate information, be habit forming, cause atomic warfare between peaceful countries, speed up male pattern baldness, interfere with your cable reception, exile you from certain third world countries, ruin your marriage, and generally spoil your day. No batteries included, no strings attached, your mileage may vary.

[puck]

Hmmmm... I'm a firm believer that bash is the one true shell. However, I usually install tcsh on all the boxes I setup, just for those people who prefer tcsh, and so that any shell scripts written in tcsh still work. As with most things I take the approach of each to his own.

I think it's just plain idiotic to have /bin/sh point to /bin/tcsh (it's probably worse than not having bash installed at all) - it will break scripts bad, real bad!

I have come across some system scripts written in ksh. That was kinda nasty, not exactly a standard shell, I had to install it on 30 odd machines once they had been deployed. Just as well I had written an automatic software distribution system! (Yes, I rewrote the wheel...)