Why are there so many shells?

[Raj_]

Hi all,

Why are there so many shells in Linux? bash, korn, csh,ksh, tcsh and so on. Isn't it true that all the shells are functionally equivalent?

[RobinVossen]

True but some have powers others dont have. a friend of mine is a big big fan of csh as its more like C.
Eg (from Wikipedia)

#!/bin/csh
if ( $#argv < 2 ) then
echo "usage: $0 minutes message"
exit 1
endif

instead of

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -lt 2 ]
then
echo "usage: $0 minutes message"
exit 1
fi

I Myself am a big fan of Perl based Shells. As I code a hell of a lot of perl code..
Aslong as you don't make big one-liners or anything. If you don't pipe, fork or anything it doesn't really matter what shell you have.
If you are new to Unix or a Linux freak of nature Bash is one of the best for you.

Some shells accept popd or pushd some accept colour some dont. There are choices.

have a look at all and pick one

[reed9]

Different shells definitely have different features.

I'm a fan of zsh myself. It has amazing autocompletion abilities. And for Arch there is a script to add tab completion for package management. I do all my package management from the command line, and I love this feature.

zsh: The last shell you’ll ever need! Fried CPU

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