On 17Apr2019 22:45, felixs <besteck...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks for your detailed comments and explanations. It will need a
second lecture with the Bash Reference Manual opened in another terminal
to fully understand the differences.
Or, as previously mentioned: just "man sh", not "man bash".
_Everything_ we've discussed here is plain Bourne shell. The difficulty
with using the bash manual _as a reference_ is that its little
extensions are not distinuished from the common subset which works
everywhere. You've remarked before that you "like bash", but actually
nothing you've described uses anything not in the standard shell -
you're not "liking bash", you're "liking the shell" and thinking the
cool stuff is specific to bash - it almost always isn't.
Writing portable scripts is a win because you don't need to change them
when you step to another distro. Accidentally becoming dependent on some
little quirk of bash will cause you pain later.
Most of bash's advantages are to do with interactive use (personally I
prefer zsh for interactive use): command line editing, job control, etc.
The scripting language extensions are, in my experience, usually of
peripheral and rare value - by the time they're genuinely useful it is
often time to shift to a more capable language like Python anyway
because you're moving out of the domain to which the shell is well
suited.
Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <c...@cskk.id.au>
