mac osx and bash

annalissa


I have read in the book "Ubuntu Linux Tool Box" by Christopher Negus and Francois caen that: bash is the shell used by default by most modern linux systems and quite few other operating systems such as Mac OSX.

1 To what extent these statements are true especially regarding Mac OSX
2 why Mac OSX is providing a bash shell, is it something similar to cygwin ?


aloshbennet

Mac OS X is based on unix, and not just a unix-like-environment like cygwin. By default, OS X ships with bash as its terminal shell.

Tip: you can always find your shell by trying Quote:ps $$


Rocket2DMn

For the record, OSX is based off of BSD which is based off of UNIX.


uselpa


1. bash is the default shell for most Linux distros and also for Mac OS X. It is not the default shell for *BSD, for example.

2. A lot of things can be done on a shell level in Mac OS X, it's not a GUI-only system.


chort

[chort@horus4 chort]$ uname -a
Darwin horus4.smtps.net 8.11.1 Darwin Kernel Version 8.11.1: Wed Oct 10 18:23:28 PDT 2007; root:xnu-792.25.20~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 i386
[chort@horus4 chort]$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash

Bash is the shell that most novice users are likely to be familiar with, hence why OS X uses it (instead of say, ksh).



hymntolife

1. It is true to some extend. AFAIK, Mac OS X is the only non-GNU OS that uses Bash as its default shell.

2. No, it is not a hack like Cygwin. Unlike Windows, Mac OS X is a true UNIX-like OS, so I guess Bash was just compiled for it the same way it is compiled on Linux.


sundialsvcs

For all the "pretty Macintosh picture" that OS/X works so hard to create, underneath that cover there beats the strong heart of ... Unix. Shell and all.