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Comment by dreamcompiler | Hacker News Reader

OT but the first command I type on a new install of MacOS is

  $ chsh -s /bin/bash

because I have 20 years worth of bash scripts that I've carefully tailored to work on bash in MacOS and Linux and I don't have time to rewrite them all just because Apple decided they don't like GPLv3.

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Before they changed the default the first command I had to type on a new install was

    $ chsh -s /bin/zsh

You can’t please everybody.

I recommend first installing a recent bash from macports, update /etc/shells first; then change to /opt/local/bin/bash. Unless you enjoy using an ancient bash.

Wtf, macports ? Please do your self a favor and install Nix package manager.

I did look at nix, but was less than enthusiastic about how complex[1] the software is. If I could, I would probably prefer gnu guix - but AFAIK it is unlikely to ever support running on macos - and is similarly complex (build daemon needed to run in background).

I'm also sad that pkgsrc seems to be abandoned wrt binary builds for macos - I could at least not find correct gpg keys for verifying the archives listed at: https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-macos/

Perhaps it's workable as a build-from-source package manager.

For now, it seems that macports have most of what I need - with less complexity than nix, and a better handling of upgrades than brew.

Does appear that brew moves faster, eg: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/65922 (i briefly tried a local build, but ran into dependency problems with libvterm that I didn't manage to resolve - there's a 0.3 [2] tarball, but the build system for neovim wasn't happy and kept finding 0.1.4 after it was uninstalled in favour of 0.3).

[1] https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/installation/installing-...

[2] https://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libvterm/

To each their own, but know that you are stuck with a really old version of bash if you do that, and it has some “interesting” bugs in it.

See something I wrote a little while ago on this topic: https://jmmv.dev/2019/11/macos-bash-baggage.html

Not necessarily if one installs bash from homebrew.

That's true, but the `chsh -s /bin/bash` that someone posted upthread does not use the homebrew version.

? Don't you just make the scripts start with `#!/user/bin/env bash`? Or do you mean aliases/functions?

You could still use those scripts with a shebang, no?

I haven’t personally found any system bash scripts that don’t work on system zsh, but I don’t use many bash features because the macOS system bash was so old and outdated. YMMV of course.

It's still bash 3 though, right? You're okay with that? I tend to install the newest from brew.

You can still run Bash from Zsh. Your terminal shell is irrelevant.

doesn’t mac show a bash deprecation warning or something else that’s obnoxious when you do that?

  export BASH_SILENCE_DEPRECATION_WARNING=1

In zsh, it should look like this when you launch bash in the shell:

$ bash

The default interactive shell is now zsh. To update your account to use zsh, please run `chsh -s /bin/zsh`. For more details, please visit https://support.apple.com/kb/HT208050. bash-3.2$

So it's easy to switch between bash and zsh. It's quite rare for me to be in situation where I need to do something that only plays nice with bash, though.

I recommend not changing the default shell, but rather having Terminal.app (or whatever) start the shell of your choice (in my case: /opt/local/bin/bash). You can't trust that the files in /opt/local or /usr/local will always be there, whereas the ones bundled by macos will.

I I do not do this because I have 20 years of zsh scripts.

Also, I like zsh better.

That changes your default shell, bash scripts (which should have the sheband `#!/usr/bin/env bash` will still get executed by bash normally.

Especially annoying if you have scripts that are meant to be sourced by the shell i.e. the shebang doesn't help you.

I that case you could try to emulate bash before sourcing the script

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