I still prefer "sh" on BSD (particularly OpenBSD). It doesn't have as many knobs to turn nor as many surprises.

sh, the Bourne shell mode of pdksh? Isn't that a little too limited? pdksh (/bin/ksh) though is great, yes.

I'm in general a big fan of the OpenBSD userland: straightforward and very, very well-documented. Real manpages, no religious "The full documentation for xyz is maintained as a TeXinfo manual" crap.

A well-conceived featureset and good docs are key to properly learning a platform. OpenBSD taught me a lot about Unix. If you later realize that Bash has some feature that you actually need, you can still install it.

Also worth noting that native borne shell was always slightly slower than korn shell. Though been a long time since I checked that one out, though did on few systems and found it to be so. But there again csh was also about then, distant memory in for many that one.

Also anything that will run script wise on bourne will run as is under korn.

Though you may well find that it is historical, which one a user picks shell wise. People who started or worked a lot with Sun systems will be csh fans. Old vets more inclided to bourne, though very few. As for korn shell, that would be mostly down to AIX systems as that is the default upon them as with the other systems mentions, default wise. Then for Linux you will find a bias towards bash.

Least that is what I have observed.

Though history does give us some intersting trends and the awk, perl, python transition and preference will also mostly be down to when somebody got into unix as a whole. Again old school, awk. Old, perl and not so long ago the python brigade.

But that is just a rule in thumb and more helpful in explaining why there is a solo perl script when everything else done in xyzzy type encounters.

As for OpenBSD, good choice, I prefer it due to the file system layout and more akin to old school unix unlike Linux which is `creative` more than not in choices, so feels less at home.

Still back in the early days we had AT&T and Berkly BSD flavours and with that the ps command, oh the fun and games.

But least thinks a little bit more common across flavours than before and yet still each has there own quirks.

I think shell performance stopped mattering the moment I dumped my 50MHz SPARC LX for a Sun Ultra 2.

Very true, but in production, every nanosecond counts sometimes.

Yes that's the one. It's perfectly fine. I found that if you have to push it past the limit it's probably the wrong tool for the job and it's time to use Python or Perl or pick something off the shelf and think about more structure to whatever you're doing.

Shell scripts really don't scale development-wise over time.

Definitely agree with the rest of the points though.

In bash fc will open your $EDITOR with the last command you just typed. Just like Ctrl-x Ctrl-e but you don't need a command in place to edit.

`man readline` and `man bash` alike blow my mind every time I pop them open.