Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 25th Jan 2007 00:43 UTC
"Once upon a time, when DOS walked the earth, the command line was the primary user interface for most of our computers. Then, Windows came along, and Microsoft seemed set on leaving the command prompt to dry up and wither into obscurity. Fortunately, Microsoft has again turned its attention to the command line and, in so doing, has produced one of the most compelling new Windows features eWEEK Labs has ever had the pleasure to test: Windows PowerShell."
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Member since:2005-07-07
Some people will tell you that bash is bloated, and I often will write a shell script so it does not NEED bash and can run on something leaner like ash or dash, but for an interactive shell bash cannot be beat. bash is the best interactive command line tool that exists today for shell work, period.
I beg to differ. ZSH is the best shell. 
Member since:2006-10-12
"but for an interactive shell bash cannot be beat. bash is the best interactive command line tool that exists today for shell work, period."
Fish (Friendly Interactive SHell: http://roo.no-ip.org/fish/ ) is a really nice attempt to build user friendly command line (especially for novice users) and polish some Bash rough edges.
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Member since:
2006-03-20
Bash is at once a shell interpreter (in its compiled form) and also a language. I think it doesn't really make sense to call a language unintuitive. Whether or not a language is intuitive is determined by the user's familiarity with similar languages, etc.
I believe that bash is very intuitive if you're fluent in ksh, for example. However, if you've never used a shell then it is not intuitive at all. Likewise, if you grew up using VBScript, bash is not intuitive (but the inverse is also very true).
Once you learn how to pipe together commands and the unix shell way of thinking, I think working in bash is very intuitive. I routinely pipe text through sed, awk, cut, tac... I construct lists of files with find, iterate over them in bash for loops or with xargs.
I like the extensions that GNU added to bash over plain old sh, and when I'm working in ksh on an AIX system, I miss all the power of gnu readline and bash's special variables and keybindings like $! or !cmd:p, etc.
Some people will tell you that bash is bloated, and I often will write a shell script so it does not NEED bash and can run on something leaner like ash or dash, but for an interactive shell bash cannot be beat. bash is the best interactive command line tool that exists today for shell work, period.