Hacker News Reader

Comment by kayman | Hacker News Reader

I run FreeBSD 10 on my servers. Coming from a linux background it felt a bit odd at first.

- Like why am I not defaulted to a bash shell.

- Never did a cornshell activation before :) [virtuanenv/bin/activate.csh]

Within a few weeks of using bsd, I felt comfortable enough to guess where configuration files are kept based on BSD logic. From an engineering point of view, it feels well thought out.

With "pkg" similar to "apt-get" it is easy for beginners to transition into maintaining a bsd server.

Managing Jails with ez-admin simplifies jails quite a bit.

I keep some notes for myself here bsd for those who might be looking to try out freebsd > 10.

http://notes.busilogic.com/freebsd.html

To get immediate value for a linux user, I recommend trying jails and compare that to using Docker. It'd be interesting to hear other people's experiences.

View on HN

Minor note: csh isn't cornshell, it's C Shell, because its syntax is somewhat c-like. Korn Shell is ksh, named after its creator, David Korn. A variant of ksh is what openbsd uses as their default user shell.

Thanks for that correction. Coming from bash background, migrated to zsh on mac, I assumed c is for corn.

Does anyone actually use csh as a login shell anymore? Does Mac OS still use tcsh as the default?

Mac OS X has used an old version of bash for awhile now.

They forked the last GPLv2 release.

tcsh is the default for root on freebsd and should always be used when working as root.

why?

It's just best practice. This is what the FreeBSD-Documentation has to say about that topic:

"It is recommended that the root user's default shell remain unchanged since shells which are not included in the base distribution are installed to /usr/local/bin. In the event of a problem, the file system where /usr/local/bin is located may not be mounted. In this case, root would not have access to its default shell, preventing root from logging in and fixing the problem."

I guess there is nothing wrong with changing the default root shell to /bin/sh, but I don't know why anyone would like to do that.

(t)csh is more likely available and the default on all Unix machines, which is the root of FreeBSD.

iirc, bash must be installed everywhere else and is not as readily available except on Linux.

Posix requires a bourne shell of some sort, not (t)csh, with a binary name of sh. Freebsd provides this through Ash. BSDs have traditionally provided a C-shell, with FreeBSD being one of the few that's kept csh as the default. OpenBSD uses pdksh, and NetBSD asks.

Posix is not Unix.

FYI that cannot be read on my phone at all. These are the only two ways I can view it: http://m.imgur.com/a/TeEJg there is no way to see the text by scrolling or zooming

Thanks for the heads up.

Made it mobile friendly. Please refresh so you get the latest css.

I find it odd to be put into a bash shell.

You don't need to guess where config files are. Unlike Linux, they're in the same place and documented in 'man hier'.

For my workstation, I don't have a need for jails (or Docker), so that's something a Linux user doesn't have to learn at first, or at all, if it's not important to them.

I meant to say, when I had projects to deploy, I found jails very convenient and would recommend trying it out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com