Warning: this is a rant against BSD (specifically FreeBSD®, but don’t let me get started on DragonFly, who think it’s wise to drop all shells except ash from the base system and rely on pkgsrc® — yay let’s compile a dozen packages just to get a shell with tab completion, not to mention boxen with no network access — for the task — although others seem to go into that direction too…; you know, there’s BSD, and then there’s FreeBSD…) — don’t like, don’t read.

If you want to change something in the BSD world, you gotta fork your own BSD — no other way around the thickheads. Ok, back then, I ran into a particularily thick one, but others tend to not be much better. Users share the thickness. If you want to change something in the GNU/Linux world, just make a package, have someone upload it, prod (or pay, Hanno got a Radler) people to do it, or just upload it yourself.

At the BSD booth at FOSDEM, despite me bringing the Windows® Mobile 6 Professional devive, strictly for Geocaching mind you, Macintosh boxen had a share of more than 50% — I didn’t manage to tip the scale. At the Debian booth, almost everyone had a “I want to buy a new laptop some day, but it just keeps on working and doesn’t break” pre-Lenovo IBM laptop. No hyping of Google either. (Last year’s CLT saw BSD people advocating pro-Schily — the guy with the broken encoding in his name — shockingly.)

Honestly, tcsh, FreeBSD® people? Sorry. While I agree that there is merit on having the same script and interactive shell, as someone has pointed out (copy-paste examples into the command line), there’s those zsh users who use mksh or GNU bash for scripting. Or just POSIX shell. And that’s with an interactive shell which can be used for scripting. On the other hand, the C shell (both csh and tcsh) cannot.

And what’s with pretending the accent gravis is non-combining, called “backtick” (such a thing does not exist); and advocating it? Sorry, if your csh/tcsh doesn’t handle the POSIX $(…) you should just drop it. (By the way, there is a convention that example command lines are prefixed with %  for csh and $  for sh (or #  but we write $ sudo  instead, these days). Use it. Or leave it. If you have examples that substitute another process’ output, be specific.) It’s funny to see how one person tries to defuse my arguments against csh by telling me “it’s just an interactive shell”, while the other argues that people copy-paste between them, to which that was my response. Read the thread!

And please, get your facts right. “I would prefer that the standard shell be at least Bourne-compatible.” You don’t want Bourne (“^” instead of “|” for pipes), you want POSIX. That GNU bash is called the Bourne-Again Shell in one of their usual semi-bad puns doesn’t help the global perception of such things any. Also, the root shell and /bin/sh are disjunct.

(Plus, why change the root shell, use sudo(8), plain and simple.)

ObNote: in jupp (should I package that for Debian, btw? rather upload, packages are ready…) the ‘`’ key is used as præfix for Ctrl-X (`X) or to directly enter numerical (decimal, octal, sedecimal/hexadecadic) ASCII, 8-bit or Unicode codepoints. Yay!
And even the FSF has seen the light; for a few releases already, GCC uses “'…'” instead of “`…'” for quoting in messages, even without locales. Great job there! (LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8 usually works, too, though.)

ObDisclaimer: I have an (yes, Google…) Alert on the word “mksh”, so I know when it’s being discussed. This obviously includes certain fora. Also, I’m a shell implementer and bound to know a certain amount of details. Plus, mksh’s build script runs with pretty much any Bourne/POSIX/Z Shell which has functions and not too many bugs. I wrote it. Go figure. No lowly trolling.

FWIW, mksh(1) has the cat(1) builtin both because Android has no cat(1), and as speed hack. Almost all other shells have worse speed hacks, like a printf(1) builtin. And recently, builtins have become direct-callable, so this actually reduces the overall system footprint. (Its inclusion also provides for some other possibilities, internally.) And as two final side notes, if you haven’t seen this: determine which shell we are run under (CVS) and I still offer a prompt conversion service (send me any GNU bash or oksh $PS1 and I’ll send that to you in mksh(1) syntax — optionally with adjustments/improvements, like cwd uses only up to 1/3 of screen width).