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Comment by jlg23 | Hacker News Reader

> The default FreeBSD shell is tcsh. I was prepared to not have bash, but tcsh is quite alien in its syntax compared to regular POSIX sh.

All FreeBSD scripts I encountered use posix shell.

> does have a dependency on perl to get the current time in seconds from the Unix epoch. This is because FreeBSD's date does not have a way to get milliseconds in the time

One could just install the GNU coreutils (probably, not checked though, much less overhead than a full perl install) or kill that problem with very few lines of C.

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> All FreeBSD scripts I encountered use posix shell.

Defaults matter, and it's helpful when the default shell for command-line use matches the shell used for scripting, because people often do scripting on the command line.

Tell that to Debian/Ubuntu as well: default user shell is Bash, default /bin/sh is dash.

If you need more-than-POSIX in your scripts, then use the proper shebang.

I use Debian, and I'm aware. Bash still uses primarily POSIX sh syntax, with extensions. It's helpful for people to be able to apply knowledge from the command line to shell scripting and vice versa, even if they have to do a bit of porting work, rather than using completely different shells and syntax.

Shell scripts are usually interoreted by the interpreter defined in the shebang and /bin/sh is a posix sh.

That's my point: the shell used on the command line should use similar syntax to the shell people most commonly use for scripting.

/bin/sh is mostly intended for scripts, less so as an interactive user shell. It needs to be small, fast and as bugfree as possible, as opposed to offering a plethora of user interactive features. That's why FreeBSD uses sh and debian uses dash for this purpose.

The default shell (what "adduser" offers as the default login shell) in FreeBSD is sh (/bin/sh). The root's shell is /bin/csh given FreeBSD's BSD roots. Though pfsense may have changed its defaults compared to a stock FreeBSD release.

GNU coreutils are also available (and useful) on MacOS.

   brew install bash coreutils findutils gawk parallel

Yes, I would've done that for a regular FreeBSD install. But as I wrote a little before that part, because it was a pfSense install, I decided not to install any additional `pkg` packages myself.

You could use a kqueue timer to run your script once per second: https://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/kqueue_tutorial/#index4h2

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