About ZSH vs. BASH

About ZSH vs. BASH

[Raúl Núñez de Arenas Coronado]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1618 bytes --]

    Hello, zsh-workers :)

    First of all, thanks for the work that all of you have dedicated
to ZSh. It simply has no price. Keep on with it.

    Let's go to the matter: we at work want to get rid of Bash for
some particular reasons, and we were ready for writing our own shell
but, unfortunately, we are coped with lot of job and cannot afford
that project by now. Anyway, the shell that we all have in mind is
quite similar with zsh: we don't want 'libreadline', we want it
modular, small, fast, and quite standard.

    So, the choice is quite simple: we will take zsh as our system
shell and sometime in the future, if necessary, will start our shell
project (if possible...). The problem here is that we use to compile
the programs we run, because our directory layout is special and
because our Linux is hand-made, not a distribution. So, we need a
shell capable of interpret the './configure' scripts and other
scripts which came with the sources.

    At this point we fully know that BASH interprets them, and we
want to know if we can use zsh not only as an user shell, but if we
can use it as our /bin/sh, fully replacing BASH; the problem is
precisely this: we cannot use both shells, although we could consider
using zsh & ash. This is not sure at all, so we would sleep better if
zsh could be used as a full replacement.

    Well, I know this may be a stupid question, but we are very
interested in introducing zsh in our systems.

    Thank you very much indeed for your time and for reading this.
You can be very proud of your work: it makes user lives easier.

    Raúl Núñez de Arenas Coronado

RE: About ZSH vs. BASH

[Andrej Borsenkow]

>
>     So, the choice is quite simple: we will take zsh as our system
> shell and sometime in the future, if necessary, will start our shell
> project (if possible...). The problem here is that we use to compile
> the programs we run, because our directory layout is special and
> because our Linux is hand-made, not a distribution. So, we need a
> shell capable of interpret the './configure' scripts and other
> scripts which came with the sources.
>
>     At this point we fully know that BASH interprets them, and we
> want to know if we can use zsh not only as an user shell, but if we
> can use it as our /bin/sh, fully replacing BASH; the problem is
> precisely this: we cannot use both shells, although we could consider
> using zsh & ash. This is not sure at all, so we would sleep better if
> zsh could be used as a full replacement.
>

This should be possible. zsh is not fully bash-compatible, but it should be
to the large extent sh-compatible (where sh means POSIX sh) if called as sh.
I just run zsh's own configure with zsh in shell mode.

But we do not have any specific compatibility tests. Keep in mind that many
Linux scripts silently assume bash and are *not* portable. It is not zsh
fault :-)

-andrej