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Old 8th March 2009
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TerryP TerryP is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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Different walks of life, different tastes BSDfan. Even though he uses bash, some how I doubt his muscle memory [sic] has grown to far beyond the 1980s ;-)


As far as I know the Almquist shell was meant to resemble the sh behavior found in the System V family + a few choice BSD extensions. Modern BSD* / Debian variants fooling with that where ever desired (*except OpenBSDs great variant of pdksh hehe) and some push towards POSIX compliance later on. I'm not very familiar with sh as found in UNIX Version 7 when Bournes shell first debuted, but it seems that between System III and the later 4BSD releases, common implementations of sh grew enough shell scripting features that make life usable today. At the end of the day -> most "modern" implementations are just a Bourne-style shell with feature creep


shells/v7sh (unix version 7, sys III, 4.3BSD-reno hybrid) and FreeBSDs /bin/sh (Almquist variant) are actually quite livable for both scripting and interactive usage, minor issues with aliases/functions aside the only part that really sucks is the lack of modern line editing lol.


Unless you go into implementation specific stuff or expect decent POSIX conformance, I honestly don't think things have changed much since the early 90s / mid 80s - aside from most users demanding job control and line editing as standard issue rather then calling it a luxury. GNU bash, OpenBSDs pdksh variant, and the Korn Shell '93 are all great shells for interactive & scripting use. (ksh93 has very interesting key binding/completion behavior.) Especially for the interactive usage bash/korn are much improved. zsh allowing '$ man foo<tab completion>' is wonderful for navigating multi-page documentation, can also be pretty damn awesome at times lol.
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