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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

are we going to get a better bash at one point? I've always felt like the only thing bash scripts are good at describing is I/O redirection. But conditionals, dealing with variables, pretty much everything else is frustrating and error-prone

I use fish as my main shell and its slightly better, but just testing things on variables can be a huge mess.

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I enjoy using fish as my main shell, but as soon as I ran into a "curl oneliner install" that failed in fish (in my case Homebrew's at the bottom of http://brew.sh/) and required me to jump into bash. I enjoy fish so much I continue to use it, but I am in a state of fear that I will at some point encounter some failing shell script that leaves my system in a broken state.

Do you have any recommendations to make fish play better with shell scripts intended for bash?

In fish, type "bash" then return. Now paste in the curl oneliner and hit return. Finally, type "exit" to exit bash and go back to fish.

I used fish for about 6 months or so and loved it - with this exception. Initially I'd just hop into bash to do whatever I needed (as another comment suggests), but what was the "last straw" for me was not being to have some of the convenience functions that virtualenvwrapper exposes for working with python virtualenvs. My solution was to switch to zsh/oh-my-zsh - I'm pretty happy with it so far, although I do miss a few things from fish (namely the auto suggest/complete when typing previous commands).

First, don't make fish your system shell. Instead have whatever terminal emulator you use launch it by default. Second feel free to jump back to bash for running things that are bash dependent.

I was jumping into bash a lot working with ROS until I made my own ROS fish bindings and still go back when I'm copying and pasting, e.g., code for grabbing some commit from Gerrit.

I'm making shok (http://shok.io) as an alternative, but it's in its infancy (read: currently useless). The basics should be usable in a few months.

shok proposes that the solution to awkward-shell-syntax is to syntactically separate the programming language from program-invocation.

Well, we've consistently gotten a better bash as bash development has proceeded. As for something that removes the warts and doesn't cut out anything too important and winds up with adoption - it'll be interesting to see...

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