this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
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I know that there are ten different alternatives. Why don't we simply improve the basic stuff?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, Apple moved to Zsh as default some years back, which is the main reason I'm familiar with its differences in terms of parameter expansion. They still ship Bash 3.2 with macOS, but they can't ship newer versions due to GPLv3 licensing, or something like that. So they had the motivation to switch.

In the Linux world, there's no great motivation to change the default, because Bash 5.x is already comparable to zsh in terms of features, and it's what everyone is already familiar with.

Perhaps I misunderstood OP's question. I figured they meant using variables. Otherwise I don't know how to make sense of it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Admittedly, I too am not certain why "noone inprove bash such that you can write a normal foor loop with whitespace in file names?" :-P I just noticed that not only was "foor" loop misspelled, and "noone" is likewise improper (should be "no one" or "nobody"), but "inprove" is also a "performance improvement company that helps clients implement their internal continuous improvement programs more effectively, and achieve better, more consistent and sustained results", according to Google's (SEO) search feature:-P

Therefore, I have little trouble believing that they wanted all of bash to be changed - for free ofc - so that they could do something like:

touch "Iron Man"; mv Iron Man The Greatest Movie of All Time!?

And the computer would auto-magically figure out that since mv is a command involving files, and "Iron Man" is a file that exists, that it should be the first argument and the rest of the text is the second argument. i.e., why learn how bash works, when you can make a post to [email protected] and put hundreds of programmers to work for you to change the entire world, at your beck and call, while also working in how ashamed they should be that they haven't done that effort preemptively?

Which ngl, might be a good idea. Or, you know, OP could learn to use tab-complete that already does that. I should have mentioned that I suppose... but it seems too late now b/c I doubt the mods will let this post remain for too much longer. Even if you were correct and they meant variables: they never actually said that, which makes this communication really difficult to both guess what OP might have meant and also solve their problem for them, on top of them being willing to learn on their own. But we can do better on our end too: perhaps we could create a community specialized in providing help to newcomers who want to learn linux - like what resources can they read/watch/play with, to help them get started? To be clear, *I'm* not offering to start that!!