Scripting newbie: what shell should I learn on? 3

[goldenradium2001]

I currently going in to study shell scripting. HOwever, I'm not really sure which shells to study scripting in. My Linux friend said that I should learn bash scripting. But my sysadmin Solaris friend says that Korn is more prevalent and I should also learn csh. The Linux friend's argument is that the bash shell is getting to be more known and that I should learn that.

What should I really do?

Thanks for any advice.

 

[mrjazz]

Hi goldenradium2001,

that is quite a difficult question.
Both of your friends are right.
I am coming from the "traditional" UNIX flavors, so my favorite shell is ksh because it has all what you need as a sysadmin (job control, history mechanism, command-line editing to name the most important features for your daily work).

You can't go wrong if you learn any shell properly (except for the Bourne shell, which hasn't got all the nice features that the newer shells have). Then it is always easy to learn at least the basic key strokes of the others (if necessary; I was working in an environment where all administrative tasks had to be done in C shell and it took me only a couple of hours to feel comfortable on the command line; still I wrote Korn shell or Perl scripts for some admin tasks).

Good luck and enjoy learning.

mrjazz

 

[DSMARWAY]

Hi,

Most shells are similar , just different ways of doing things. You should learn the fundamentals of a shell, what it is , what can be done in a shell, I believe to learn anything you must have a specification/task to implement or solve.

 

[MikeLacey]

It's worth thinking about where your scripts will run; and where they might run in the future. Perl turns up everwhere nowadays and seems to do whatever I need to. I rarely use anything else now. Mike
________________________________________________________________

"Experience is the comb that Nature gives us, after we are bald."

Is that a haiku?
I never could get the hang
of writing those things.

 

[ami123]

I would suggest you go for Korn shell,for the simple reason that you can use Korn-shells on both Linux and UNIX-clone systems,whereas bash is normally not supported on UNIX-clone machines.
amit
crazy_indian@lycos.com

to bug is human to debug devine