Why would you need to pay O'Reilly when you can just read the man page?

Why would you need any reference book when you can just read the f****** manual?

Man, such elitist a*******/zealots on this board...

Just type a few characters, hit enter, and you have your favorite shell.
It's a non-issue. Same as: the new Macs have a different desktop pattern.

Try downloading this:

http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/abs-guide-2.0.tar.bz2

This web-based document helped me a lot when I started bash scripting. It's written from a Linux prospective but that really does not matter much. This is from someone who wrote a book, I kid you not, entitled "How-2 Meet Women." I haven't read the latter, so I'm not really sure if this site is a geek's nirvana.

Not much of a terminal user.

I use tcsh on the Mac, bash on Linux and I don't see the difference. I'm no expert with shell scripting or anything, but I don't see what the fuss is all about.

Can someone tell me what the difference actually is?

Bash is NOT the new default in either the WWDC seed, 7B44 release, nor will it be the default in the shipping version of Panther. Expect to continue to see tcsh for good reason.

This is about the least important 'news' I've ever read. If you didn't like tcsh, the option was always there to change it. Anyone that knows the difference should know how to change it.

What other Panther minutiae can we report on next? "ooooh - Panther changed the default desktop picture - stop the presses!"

use tcsh though...

For ISP using both OSX and Linux as OS, it's a kind of good news.

It's very borring to work with shells with different behaviours (like command completion, persistent command history with bash, not with tcsh, etc.) Good Steeve!

yeah, ok. I guess every single developer build I've downloaded from my ADC account and done fresh installs with HAVE NOT had bash as the default shell when I first launch my terminal. maybe I was just imagining things when I opened it for the first time after every new fresh install.

I can't remember if it was for the WWDC preview, but it's bee like that since every build after that (I got close to 40 kernel panics from the WWDC release, so I ditched it).

you obviously haven't done a fresh install with panther to figure it out yet.

"ANYTHING else they can do to limit the differences between OSX and LINUX can do nothing but help Apple in the adoption of their OS and servers, etc."

Yeah, they should get rid of that pesky Aqua interface and replace it with KDE. Mac OS X should be exactly like Linux, only $129 more expensive.

Hopefully the majority of users who use the terminal for much of anything know how to switch shells... and all you have to do to switch the default shell is change a single pref setting in terminal.

Hardly an earthshattering change to the OS.

My TV comes default with the channel set to 4.

Well, I like my TV comes set to channel 8.

Yea, but all of my TV's were on channel 2 when I got them and now it matches! Whoohoo.

Sorry, lost my mind for a second....

tcsh has command line completion and command history. Suggest real reasons why bash is better and someone might believe you.

bash allows you to edit the command line, which is incredibly useful. If you want to use bash now (in Jaguar), merely edit the Terminal Preferences by selecting "Execute this command" and making it
/bin/bash

You can go back to tcsh by changing the line to
/bin/tcsh.

Now I'm really getting a Dell!

> bash allows you to edit the command line, which is incredibly useful.

And how is this different from tcsh? You can edit the command line in tcsh too. I suggest you read a history on tcsh. It explains why it was made and how it differs from the old standby csh. (It was to add TOPS-20 fearures like command line editing to csh)

I can't think of anything clever to say about tsch.

Those with a preference know enough to change shells. If you are concerned over which shell to use and don't know how to change them.... you fill in the rest.

I never used tcsh anyway. One of the first things I did was set my default shell to bash

it's syntactically compatible with csh, yet has bash-like enhancements---what's not to like?

Poor move, Apple.

Bash has been the default login shell for new users since 7B21. If you didn't do a fresh install or copied over Terminal preferences from a previous install (preserving a custom shell setting) you probably wouldn't have noticed it.

One advantage to using bash by default is that most shell scripts are written using Bourne-style syntax, so there's a bit more consistency there. Some things, like redirecting stderr to a file, are far easier in Bourne-style shells. Since bash is so popular with the Linux crowd, it's probably getting a bit more active development.

On the other hand, I don't think bash has spelling correction like tcsh, and the completion functionality doesn't look as strong. Bash doesn't have the global login and logout files that tcsh has in etc, making something like the tcsh "examples" in Jaguar difficult to implement on a system-wide basis. It's certainly a tradeoff, and will probably get Apple lots of feedback wondering why the Terminal is "broken" like when they removed the examples from the default tcsh config.

Sure - why make one million Linux users learn a new shell or change their preferences when you can make four million Mac users do it instead.

Yet another reason not to upgrade to Panther.

now reason not to upgrade to panther unless you do not have an extra 129$ dell-wad...

According to Apple, there are about 7 million Mac OS X users. Linux users (difficult to count) are estimated at around double that. And almost all of them have some interaction with the shell, unlike the vast majority of Mac users for whom the Terminal is somewhere between a nightmare of confusion and a curious peek into another world. It makes far more sense to bring Mac OS X in line with the mainstream community, if one were picking which one to change.

"Yet another reason not to upgrade to Panther"? What are the others? And why is this a reason, when it's trivial to set the shell to tcsh if you want it (just as it could be set to bash in Jaguar)?

if you don't like it, change it back...

sudo nicl . -create /users/yourusernamehere shell "/bin/tcsh"

If you're so apt to cry about them changing your shell, you should be capable of typing this one in to change it back. This is such a non-issue...

It's a bit late out of the blocks, but I do think this is an interesting little tidbit of information. And all things being equal, having the Linux shell as the default is probably a good idea in the long run.

That said, the fact that this even COULD be an issue for anybody (particularly the people here who actually sound upset about the decision) is just sad. Aside from the fact that it takes about two seconds to change the setting if you don't like it (as you always could, since they were and are both installed), the majority of casual terminal dabblers probably won't even notice the difference.

I'd guess that if you're upset about the change, you probably don't know enough for it to affect you.

Sheesh.

just change the shell your users have in netinfo.

this isn't rocket science. any unix box can have the 'default shell' replaced in /etc/passwd.

god these people are such idiots.

by the way, zsh rules bash and tcsh. h0h0h0.

The in side word is that bash has licensing issues (it's GPL and not BSD) so they couldn't toss it in. Either they found a BSD version or it's not actually bash.

On my Jawire system, bash is actuall sh (or vice versa) and tcsh is also csh, but zsh is it's own thing:

alf@lynx:/bin diff -b bash zsh
Binary files bash and zsh differ
alf@lynx:/bin diff -b csh tcsh
alf@lynx:/bin diff -b sh bash

Tcsh is a bad idea anyway.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/

No it isnt't

>http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/

Did you even read it? It is talking about shell PROGRAMMING, not your normal interactive shell. Totally different beast. bash is harmful as a programming shell as well since it is a superset of sh and you shouldn't use the extra features in your shell scripts either. Write your shell scripts in plain sh but don't let that affect your login shell.

* better filehandle manipulation
* better variable manipulation (set/setenv)
* variable interpolation
* better loop constructs
* tcsh doesn't list all files in a dir that match a partial filespec when you hit tab

For someone who writes/debugs shell scripts for a living, sh is far superior to csh, which inherits a world of pain in exchange for some superficial C-ness.

Apple needs to write their own terminal shell. They could call it ibash, or etcsh, or maybe xbash. Or maybe they could just call it geeksshouldgetalifebeforeIbashyoumotherfuckerstoapulp.

hmm. All that & I don't see a post giving the Real Way to change default shells.

Go to NetInfo Manager, select users>yourusername. Click the lock to make changes, change the default shell in the lower pane.

This changes all logins, including ssh and whatever krazy things might open a new shell. The Terminal pref is more of a "use non-default shell" than a "change default shell".

give that guy his gold OS X badge. Your mommy will be so proud of you!!

my sister into a devil-worshipper and caused me to abuse myself.

Then, Billy Graham laid hands on my family, especially my sister, and we converted to bash. Billy revealed to us that Satan uses zsh and therefore we must stick to bash or better yet, just sh if we want to stay on the straight and narrow. Unfortunately, I still abuse myself, sometimes.

Sounds like Bible BASHing to me.