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bash is new default terminal shell in Panther

updated 01:30 am EDT, Tue August 26, 2003

One MacNN reader notes that latest (private) developer version of Panther, Apple's next release of Mac OS X, uses to bash as the default shell for Panther 7B44."

"That may please Mac users who are already comfortable with bash on their Linux machines, but those of us who have stayed with the default settings in Jaguar will have to unlearn a few tcsh-specific things and become much more familiar with bash."

"In the long-run, it will be good to share this similarity with the Linux world, which is growing at such a fast rate. What I'd like to know, though, is Apple's motivation for this change. It will give a lot of publishing companies an excuse to update all their Mac-specific UNIX books that were already too expensive the first time around."

by MacNN Staff

(46)

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08/26, 01:38am | report spam | close Reply |
Word.

First post.

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08/26, 01:41am | report spam | close Reply |
Yay!

I didn't understand what their facination with tcsh was. I'm no expert, but I've used bash for a while and when writing improptu shell scripts, et cetera, the small differences in syntax was annoying.

So, for me this is a welcome change. Anyone actually know/care what the differences are?

(I've probably just set off a holy war on the magnitude of vi vs. emacs ...)

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08/26, 01:54am | report spam | close Reply |
Smart Move

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.

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08/26, 02:03am | report spam | close Reply |
Motivation?

The only 'motivation' is that Wilfredo Sanchez no longer controls it.. tcsh was his shell, he left apple, so the BSD group changed it cause they didn't like tcsh.

Really.

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08/26, 02:07am | report spam | close Reply |
Ummm..

They actually switched it about a month back.

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08/26, 02:09am | report spam | close Reply |
Old news

It was changed in the WWDC build.

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08/26, 02:51am | report spam | close Reply |
Wow, they posted it!!

Bash never came up for me with WWDC, 7B21, 7B28, or 7B39. Maybe I moved my preferences to the newly created Home directory each time before launching Terminal, and that maintained the former default preference for tcsh. I guess I should have recognized the connection between the Sanchez departure and the switch to bash. Do I really want to feed O'Reilly another huge sum of money for updated editions of their already expensive voluminous books just to become familiar with bash?

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08/26, 03:01am | report spam | close Reply |
too bad

I'd rather have tcsh. But I doubt tcsh is removed, just not default so those of use who avoid sh type shells for real work can set it up for our logins. FreeBSD and others use tcsh or csh or other non bash non GPLed shells as default as well.

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08/26, 03:20am | report spam | close Reply |
Yipee!

This is great news! Now both OSes I use wil have the same default shell.

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08/26, 03:22am | report spam | close Reply |
I used bash anyway

I just changed everything to bash anyway... it's simply a better shell... Heck I even have all my users on the BSD (AMD) box using bash.

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08/26, 03:24am | report spam | close Reply |
rtfm

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

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08/26, 03:42am | report spam | close Reply |
Why

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

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

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08/26, 04:09am | report spam | close Reply |
Who cares?

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.

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08/26, 04:18am | report spam | close Reply |
Bash scripting info

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.

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08/26, 05:52am | report spam | close Reply |
Boring...

Not much of a terminal user.

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08/26, 06:27am | report spam | close Reply |
What's the difference?

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?

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08/26, 07:37am | report spam | close Reply |
bash is NOT new default

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.

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08/26, 07:54am | report spam | close Reply |
errr...

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!"

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08/26, 08:15am | report spam | close Reply |
you can still

use tcsh though...

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08/26, 08:27am | report spam | close Reply |
good news

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!

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08/26, 08:35am | report spam | close Reply |
re: bash is NOT new...

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.

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08/26, 08:48am | report spam | close Reply |
re: smart move

"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.

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08/26, 08:51am | report spam | close Reply |
?????

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.

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08/26, 09:35am | report spam | close Reply |
Gee...

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....

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08/26, 09:35am | report spam | close Reply |
re: good news

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

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08/26, 09:38am | report spam | close Reply |
bash / tcsh

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.

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08/26, 09:40am | report spam | close Reply |
That's it!

Now I'm really getting a Dell!

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08/26, 09:46am | report spam | close Reply |
re: bash / tcsh

> 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)

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08/26, 09:47am | report spam | close Reply |
stop bashing bash

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.

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08/26, 09:49am | report spam | close Reply |
bash is better

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

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08/26, 10:30am | report spam | close Reply |
TCSH is better

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

Poor move, Apple.

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08/26, 10:36am | report spam | close Reply |
Default since 7B21

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.

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08/26, 10:57am | report spam | close Reply |
Bleh

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.

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08/26, 11:05am | report spam | close Reply |
there is

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

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08/26, 11:31am | report spam | close Reply |
Users

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)?

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08/26, 12:26pm | report spam | close Reply |
just change it back....

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...

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08/26, 02:03pm | report spam | close Reply |
Interesting, but...

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.

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08/26, 02:30pm | report spam | close Reply |
its in netinfo, stupid

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.

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08/26, 03:07pm | report spam | close Reply |
tcsh consdered harmfull

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/

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08/26, 03:27pm | report spam | close Reply |
re: tcsh considered harmf

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.

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08/26, 03:59pm | report spam | close Reply |
bourne-derived shells rok

* 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.

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08/26, 06:14pm | report spam | close Reply |
I think...

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.

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08/27, 01:33am | report spam | close Reply |
how to change

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".

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08/27, 01:53am | report spam | close Reply |
whoa...

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

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08/27, 07:57am | report spam | close Reply |
tsch turned

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.

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08/28, 01:34pm | report spam | close Reply |
Billy Graham

Sounds like Bible BASHing to me.

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bash is new default terminal shell in Panther

updated 01:30 am EDT, Tue August 26, 2003

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