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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

Random question for you, how does the shell experience on FreeBSD compare to MacOS? Linux?

Why would you care at all about something like that? No matter if I am on Linux, BSD or OSX, I am installing the shell I like&want to use and don't spend more time in default bash/tcsh/whatever else of the OS than it takes to perform install and run `chsh`. It's like literally one of the last things that'd weight on my OS choice.

A shell is a shell for the most part. The details can be a bit different (like your $PATH), but otherwise its largely the same.

try

   rm -rf somedir/

   rm somedir/ -rf

Linux (the former) allows me to be lazy while MacOS (the latter) forces me to hit crtl-a and insert -rf.

GNU rm (coreutils) vs BSD rm.

I will never get used to the trailing slash on source arguments in BSD cp (that copies directory contents rather than the directory itself)! The first thing I do on an OS X machine is install GNU coreutils.

Me either. I've also got a habit of adding '-rf' as the last argument to 'rm' so I can safely tab complete things in my home directory without a mistaken "enter" press nuking everything.

I'm used to that from rsync. I find it quite handy.

This may be why I never found rsync comfortable.

Major correction, the former is MacOS and the latter is Linux allowed (options can be before positional arguments).

Yep. Mostly the same. Hence the reason I question why FreeBSD might be worth it. The overlap of OSX and FreeBSD at the shell is quite great, but you can't run a lot of OSX apps on FreeBSD. I'd venture to guess you could run a lot more FreeBSD apps on OSX.

I usually install a GNU shell and use that - I don't use FreeBSD out of idealism but because it works better. Things like ctrl-T make it a little nicer than Linux, but on the whole it's pretty similar.

OS X userland was forked from FreeBSD 15 years back.

It's not that far removed even now, although config is standard /etc

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