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Red Hat Nullifies Differences Between Bash, Csh 521

Posted by Hemos from the funny-funny-haha dept.
Andreas(R) writes "Red Hat Software has revealed that future versions of the distribution will hide the differences between command-line user interfaces, creating a 'more unified shell prompt experience'. 'I don't mind if they rebrand and unify the GNOME and KDE interfaces,' said one Linux longhair. 'Frankly, I rarely use GUIs. But when they start messing with my CLI, then it's personal. I'm not going to sit here and let Red Hat infect my beloved tcsh with those annoying quirks from bash." Ah, nothing like satire that only a small group will truly grok. *grin*
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Red Hat Nullifies Differences Between Bash, Csh More

Red Hat Nullifies Differences Between Bash, Csh

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  • Dear god (Score:5, Funny)

    by EggplantMan ( 549708 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:04PM (#4595948) Homepage
    Please don't let RedHat make emacs like vi

  • cmd (Score:5, Funny)

    by Evil Adrian ( 253301 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:05PM (#4595959) Homepage
    Why don't they just use cmd.exe? ;-)

  • rash? (Score:5, Funny)

    by outsider007 ( 115534 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:06PM (#4595972)
    I'm not going to sit here and let Red Hat infect my beloved tcsh with those annoying quirks from bash

    RedHat's
    Annoying
    SHell

  • FAKE NEWS (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Read the link. This is FAKE news designed to humor us. Can't believe Slashdot would even post this...
    • Why not?

    • Re:FAKE NEWS (Score:3, Informative)

      by ripewithdecay ( 573894 )
      They have this in their FAQ, too...

      This stuff is fake, right?

      Yes, the "news" articles published here at Humorix are, ahem, all made up. Fake, fake, fake. Don't take anything we say seriously (except for this sentence, of course).

      A few people have actually written in and asked if an article was true or not. While we are flattered that our fabrications were mistaken for actual news, the fact remains: everything here is fake. A few nuggets of truth might be found, but everything else is a figment of our imaginations. If in doubt, just remember this saying: "Fake news is to Humorix as unconfirmed rumors are to Slashdot."

    • Re:FAKE NEWS (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tunah ( 530328 )
      Um... it's under the "funny" icon, the site is called "Humorix" and the description includes the word "satire"... what was your point again?

  • it is a joke! (Score:2, Informative)

    by u19925 ( 613350 )
    though I wish this was really true, but unfortunately, it is just a joke.
  • does mean in bash I can say `setenv PATH ~/bin:${PATH}' or even `set path (~/bin $path)' or the other way around, in csh `EXPORT PATH=~/bin:$PATH'?

  • bash? csh? i give my users... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dboyles ( 65512 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:08PM (#4595995) Homepage
    /bin/false

    It really is much more secure.

    • Re:bash? csh? i give my users... (Score:5, Funny)

      by psavo ( 162634 ) <psavo@iki.fi> on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:16PM (#4596076) Homepage
      To be sure, I give the fuckers /dev/random. If lucky, it'll screw their terminal and they won't bother me.

      • Re:bash? csh? i give my users... (Score:5, Funny)

        by FauxPasIII ( 75900 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @09:29PM (#4597054)
        >> To be sure, I give the fuckers /dev/random. If lucky, it'll screw their terminal and they won't bother me.

        But if you're supremely unlucky, it'll drop them to a SUID root perl process. Do not taunt /dev/random.
      • It won't work. /dev/random isn't usually marked as executable. Even if it were, it wouldn't even get to run anything unless by some miracle the random string was a valid ELF header. Of course, the random string could also be something like "#!/bin/bash", thereby giving them a shell.

        What you want to do is make a script like:

        #!/bin/sh
        cat /dev/random

        Then make that script their shell. When they log in, they'll just get lots of random crap.

    • Re:bash? csh? i give my users... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DragonWyatt ( 62035 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:41PM (#4596257) Homepage
      /bin/false

      It really is much more secure.

      Actually, in some old *nixes, that absolutely was NOT the case. If the shell in /etc/passwd returned a non-zero value (note that /bin/false always returns 1), 'login' would drop them immediately to an emergency shell for 'maintenance'- usually a statically-linked Bourne shell, and sometimes a setuid root version!

      Not that this behavious persists today, but just to be safe, use /bin/true instead ;) .
    • And especially so when you complement its use with the /dev/null video accelerator.

    • Re:bash? csh? i give my users... (Score:5, Funny)

      by jpetts ( 208163 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @07:06PM (#4596405)
      /bin/false

      That is simply not true...

  • Hmm (Score:2, Informative)

    by Hamster Of Death ( 413544 )
    First thing I read in the article:

    Fake News written by James Baughn on September 25, 2002
    from the let-the-flame-wars-continue! dept.

    I think the -Fake News- part might reveal some insight on the credibility of the story!

    • Re:Hmm (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Dude, you are right, it's a fake story! It's Satire! THEY ARE NOT REALLY DOING THIS SO CALM DOWN! Dind't the foot as the Icon give you Clue #2? :x:q or was that ^q? Damn Vimacs!

      • True Comedy... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonvmous Coward ( 589068 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:27PM (#4596149)
        "Dude, you are right, it's a fake story! It's Satire! THEY ARE NOT REALLY DOING THIS SO CALM DOWN! Dind't the foot as the Icon give you Clue #2? :x:q or was that ^q? Damn Vimacs!"

        I think the real comedy here isn't the satirical write-up, but the responses to it.
  • Who cares if they change the shell? As long as they publish API's for the middleware pieces, how could we possibly complain?
  • I honestly can't tell.

    They both suck.

    zsh all the way, mofos.

    - A.P.

  • hahaha (Score:3, Funny)

    by sanermind ( 512885 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:15PM (#4596058)
    That's great. Don't bother reading this comment. Nothing insightfull hear.

    ....but DAMN, that was funny. I loved the part about vimacs and emavics.... couldn't stop laughing. I don't understand why some people are posting complaints, like
    How dare a serious news site like /. put this on the
    main page


    Geesh. I'm glad for it, it brightened my day.

  • Slashdot Nullifies Differences Between News, Hoax (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jukal ( 523582 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:15PM (#4596066) Journal
    As stated in some other thread as well, read the first 2 lines of the atleast [i-want-a-website.com] : "Fake News written by James Baughn". And still, if you wish to speculate on the matter. Speculate on whether you are still capable of choosing your favorite /bin/l33t if you are capable of speculating on this speculative hoax?

  • Holy mother of god! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rob Riggs ( 6418 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:16PM (#4596074) Homepage Journal
    I've never seen such a collection of knee-jerk humorless reactionaries in my life!!! I think the responses to this article are funnier than the article itself.

    Warning: serious reactions to this article will go on your permanent record!!!

  • What's funnier? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MalleusEBHC ( 597600 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:20PM (#4596102)
    The article itself, or the fact that it seems like the majority of posters have failed to:

    A) RTFA
    B) Notice that this is "from the funny-funny-haha dept."
    C) Read the editors comment Hemos left in the little blurb once again clueing them into the fact that the article is a joke just like the ignorant fools who have started to bitch already.

  • Best part from the article.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by schon ( 31600 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:23PM (#4596120)
    This bit had me rolling on the floor..

    The head of the Emacs Flame War Re-enactment Society (a group that re-enacts the great Usenet emacs versus vi flames wars of the 20th Century) said, "Red Hat is destroying our cultural heritage!

    Ahh.. I know guys who belong to war re-enactment societies.. and this about sums them up..
  • I love it when Slashdot posts stuff like this. All the morons that don't read the articles look stupid when they go off on a tangent.

    It's like April 1st but better.

    For the record, I can be caught not reading the articles from time to time [slashdot.org] - but I never said I wasn't a moron.

  • how are they going to manage to avoid the thousands of #!/bin/bash scripts?

    its one thing to say they want to *create* another unified shell say, /bin/rh-shell or somesuch, which 'unifies' shell differences (?why?) but how are you they going to do this without the headaches?

    they would be further ahead to just say "we use /bin/bash" and switch EVERYTHING in RedHat GNU/Linux to it.

  • I use the new shell .. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dr. Awktagon ( 233360 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:33PM (#4596201) Homepage
    .. and it's actually pretty good, especially for newbies. For instance, "redhat-list-my-files-in-current-directory" is a little heavily branded, but it makes a lot more sense than "ls" to a new user. And the "Are you sure you want to run 'xyz' (Y/n)" prompts after every command saved my ass a couple times. Getting rid of all commands that can delete files is also great for security, and that's definitely an advantage over other distros.

    The only thing that really tripped me up was that Red Hat mapped "delete character" to the "d" key (probably to fix the whole backspace/delete confusion once and for all). And the character D is mapped to ^X-F4 which is a little hard to type at first but you get used to it. Since they made this change system-wide I learned it pretty fast.

    All in all a step in the right direction. Of course power users can always use another distro, or just type their system's source code onto the hard drive from scratch or whatever it is they do for fun on Saturday nights.
  • It's all configurable by toggling a GConf key. Unfortunately the next release of Red Hat will continue the trend by making all their configuration tool GUIs, and move to a database format for their GConf keys, so... .. you will need a GUI to change your TUI!

  • In related news... (Score:3, Funny)

    by cmeans ( 81143 ) <chris.a.means@gmail. c o m> on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:42PM (#4596259) Journal
    Continuing it's efforts to blend various distinct elements of Open Source projects into unified implementations (See previous articles on GUIs and CLIs), RedHat will soon be providing a single application development & scripting language to replace C/C++, Perl, Python, Java, Forth, and Smalltalk.

    The new language doesn't have a name yet, but you can be sure that few will like the idea, many will have an opinion, and noone will read the actual announcement.

  • > And here Red Hat comes along and combines
    > features from bash, csh, ksh, and zsh and
    > repackages it as 'rhash'

    I'm getting a rash already ;-) This is will do more harm than anything else they do!

  • Life-free geeks who care about this stuff all use Debian or Slackware anyway."

    from the article, 'nuff said :-)

  • Can't wait for vimacs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SiliconEntity ( 448450 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @06:49PM (#4596309)
    Seriously, I often have vi running in the left window and emacs in the right hand one. It's a good mental exercise to switch back and forth between them frequently. I wish I could train myself to use my right hand for emacs and the left for vi, but I'm not there yet. Maybe I could do it with two chord keyboards?

    • Re:Can't wait for vimacs (Score:5, Funny)

      by MyHair ( 589485 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @07:18PM (#4596474) Journal
      I wish I could train myself to use my right hand for emacs and the left for vi, but I'm not there yet. Maybe I could do it with two chord keyboards?

      Chord keyboards are too expensive. During troubleshooting a PC last week I had a ps/2 keyboard and a USB keyboard hooked up while trying to get the USB keyboard to work for the power-on password. After finishing I coincidentally had two working keyboards at 90 degree angles in a comfortable position for my hands. (This was a cubicle with a desk on each wall plus the little shelf that goes between them.) For the amusement of a coworker and myself I typed a few sentences and was surprised to see how natural it was for me.

      Now, as many geeks know, Dvorak made one-handed keyboard layouts, one for the left and one for the right. I've had thoughts about learning the left one to keep my mouse hand free (one or two Slashdotters have claimed they do this; I haven't because I'm a tech/sysadmin and use everyone else's keyboards), but now you and I could learn the left- and right-hand Dvoraks for simultaneous vi & emacs usage.

      If we can do that, then we can probably solve that Palestinean-Israeli thing afterwards.
      • > Now, as many geeks know, Dvorak made one-handed keyboard layouts, one for the left and one for the right. I've had thoughts about learning the left one to keep my mouse hand free (one or two Slashdotters have claimed they do this; I haven't because I'm a tech/sysadmin and use everyone else's keyboards)

        I'm still using the clunky yet compatible QWERTY, but one nice trick to simultaneous mouse/keyboard operation is using the mouse with your left hand (if you're right handed). There are several advantages:

        • With only one hand to type with, it's better to use the more dexterous one.
        • If you have a desktop keyboard with a number pad, your hands will be closer together and probably more comfortable.
        • Using the mouse isn't too complicated for the left hand. Your right-hand dexterity would be wasted on this simple activity.
        • Your right hand is naturally closer to the right edge of the keyb, where the arrows and other controls are. Great for web surfing.
        I've had it this way for years. Of course for proper touch typing you'll like using both hands, at least with qwerty.
  • Like, say, the group that actually uses the word 'grok' in conversation?
  • Worst...misuse...of..."grok"...ever.
  • Bob Hutzfield has put a dozen copies of "Red Hat Linux 10.0" up for auction at eBay.com. He claims that his toilet is the portal to a "temporal vortex singularity" and that the toilet periodically spits out items from the future. Last week, a package containing twelve Red Hat Linux 10.0 shrink-wrapped boxes materialized at the toilet vortex. Hutzfield is now offering them at auction with a minimum bid of US$1000.

    The following press release was taken from the eBay auction page. Hutzfield claims that he found this press release inside the package that emerged from his toilet vortex.

    Click here RH10.0Linux for the toilet [i-want-a-website.com]
  • Why would they even *want* to do this. Like 90% of all Linux users I use the shell chosen by my distro. That's almost 100% Bash. I've done some pretty techie stuff with my system and tend to be a pretty advanced RedHat user but the thought of changing my shell never even occurred to me. After all, it works just great, why would I care? It seems to me only total techie geeks would reject the Bash shell and if they're so damn techie why create a distro that limits this ability. Am I missing something here???
  • from http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html [gnu.org]
    i found the original alt.religion.emacs post here: groups.google.com [google.com]

    ... nevermind, there is no way this post is making it past the lameness filter. too bad, read the link.

    • Re:Ed is the standard editor (Score:5, Funny)

      by josh crawley ( 537561 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @08:21PM (#4596754)
      When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi *and* Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, 'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
      Ed, man! !man ed
      ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
      NAME
      ed - text editor
      SYNOPSIS
      ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
      DESCRIPTION
      Ed is the standard text editor.
      ---
      Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED! "Ed is the standard text editor." And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:

      -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929 /bin/ed
      -rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970 /usr/ucb/vi
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990 /usr/bin/emacs

      Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!

      "Ed is the standard text editor." Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:

      golem$ ed

      ?
      help
      ?
      ?
      ?
      quit
      ?
      exit
      ?
      bye
      ?
      hell o?
      ?
      eat flaming death
      ?
      ^C
      ?
      ^C
      ?
      ^D
      ?
      ---
      Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.

      "Ed is the standard text editor." Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
      ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!

      When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!

      TEXT EDITOR.

      When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.

      Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!

      ---BELOW this is garbage filled to pass IDIOTIC lameness filter the fuckwads at Slashdot implemented. I know Me how antidest guerge Now heusdys I dont qwnas Prutwew
  • With all of the gaps being closed in being able to pick one distribution over the next, I give the bounty to the first distribution to NOT include Emacs in the "default install" button. Oh yea, and include blackbox/fluxbox as one of the "default" window managers. (they can put KDE and GNOME on the "options" or "Contributed" CD). And why they are at it, they can decide on 1 font manager (xfstt) for the whole distribution VS. the 1 font manager for each app you see nowdays. That should be a pretty cool distro that I could throw at this old assed hardware that I have.

    PS -- The article made me laugh hard, and miss satirewire even more.

  • Below the belt (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jim Norton ( 453484 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @08:01PM (#4596678)
    "Over the years, we've received nearly 1,000 technical support calls from people that have accidentally started vi and couldn't figure out how to do anything -- or even how to quit."

    I resent that! I know how to quit when using vi! ALT-F2! kill -9 vi!

  • This is the real story! (Score:3, Funny)

    by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @04:06AM (#4598039)
    Code Taco Emergency! [i-want-a-website.com]

    Best quotes: HUMORIX WORLD HEADQUARTERS -- Two Humorix unpaid interns were injured earlier today as the result of mass panic induced by an unexpected attack of the dreaded Slashdot Effect.

    The two injured interns are actually specially bred chickens trained to peck the reboot button on our two Windows PCs when the screen turns blue

    ... and .... Preliminary calculations show that the damage caused by the Great Slashdot Effect Attack of November 2002 will likely total several dozen dollars. :)

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