fish, the friendly interactive shell, is a commandline shell intended to be interactive and user-friendly.
fish is intentionally not fully POSIX compliant, it aims at addressing POSIX inconsistencies (as perceived by the creators) with a simplified or a different syntax. This means that even simple POSIX compliant scripts may require some significant adaptation or even full rewriting to run with fish.
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I just switched to fish for the pretty colors and quality of life features. Anything I should keep in mind while using it as a Linux noob? I don’t even know who POSIX is lol.
I HIGHLY recommend using bash and zsh as posix-compliant shells at the beginning, then if you want something different; you can use whatever the hell you want. Nushell, fish, etc.
I HIGHLY recommend using bash and zsh as posix-compliant shells at the beginning
Why? All the usual shell scripts don’t use Fish as interpreter.
No posix compliance is a headache. (Where the hell are my aliases!?) And also most scripts need to be executed in a posix-compliant shell.
Most scripts need to be executed in a posix-compliant shell
Simple. Just add #!/bin/bash to the start of your script and call it a day.
Or use #!/usr/bin/env bash if you’re goated with the sauce. This won’t work if you’re not goated with the sauce.
Those who are goated with the sauce know what’s up.
why use aliases (they exist in fish) when you can use abbreviations and your history isnt determined by whatever you set your aliases up as? If you change an alias, your history does not reflect that. If you use abbreviations, your history is perfectly usable
WIll I be able to take my shell with on to every other computer I meet ? I mean, these things are tiny, but how portable are shells ? I don’t want to learn a bunch of useful custom commands and then become frustrated to do anything on every computer other than mine.
That’s why I have a qwerty keyboard, I don’t want to become useless whenever I have to use a keyboard that isn’t my keyboard…
Fish is not the worst in this regard, because:
- The defaults are pretty good, so you don’t typically need a config file for it to be usable.
- As of version 4.0, Fish is (experimentally) available as a single executable for download from their GitHub page. So, even on hosts where you can’t install anything, you may still be able to copy that executable file onto there and use it.
But there may still be situations where it’s annoying, like if you’re working in a container, then you likely don’t want to mount your
fishexecutable every time.But I also have to say I don’t find it too big of a deal.
I still use Bash for scripting (just throw aorat the top of your script, like you should anyways), and then for interactive use, not that much of the shell syntax comes into play anyways.
And if I ever do need to copy a complex Bash command into an interactive shell, I can just runbash, then run the command in there and thenexitback out.Shell configs are hard to move. Some in $HOME/.config , some in .[idk]rc files, etc.
It’s messy. Unless you write everything you modify. If you did not do that up to now…good luck moving shell configs.
What? No they aren’t hard to move. They’re usually just one file. Copy to your new machine and done.
I have no shell configs of any kind because it seemed like everytime I used another computer, I would not have them and I would end up having the re-learn everything.
So instead I google every command every time or ask chatgpt, like this
I find it very annoying there’s isn’t a reliable way to use alias or shells, functions and stuff.
I have no shell configs of any kind because it seemed like everytime I used another computer, I would not have them and I would end up having the re-learn everything.
What I do is store my dotfiles in a git repository, and leave symlinks to the files in that repository. Then, when I move to another computer, pulling over all my configuration consists of doing a
git pullto pull the git repo over and then running a command to set up the symlinks on that new computer. I can also make changes and selectively push things in. Some things need to be specific to a computer, and those don’t go in.I use a homebrew script to set up the symlinks. A number of people use GNU stow for this.
kagis for an example of someone using stow
https://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html?round=two
If you edit the symlinks in emacs (and I imagine vim), it picks up on the fact that they’re symlinks into a git repository and that they’re version-controlled.
So, like:
-
Have a bare git repository on home machine, the “master” copy.
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Every machine with an account has a non-bare dotfiles git repository checked out and symlinks pointing into that repo.
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Make any changes on a given machine like you normally would, then git commit them to the local non-bare dotfiles git repo and push them to the master repository.
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If setting up on a new machine, pull the git repository, and then run the command to set up the symlinks.___
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“POSIX compliant shells” means shells that work with… Fuck how do I even describe this simplistically? A lot of scripts are ran by a program named “sh”. Sometimes it is bash, sometimes dash, but they’re all POSIX compliant which means they’ve got some standard things that most people expect.
Using a non POSIX compliant shells will be okay, because programs trying to use “sh” will still work (unless you set something up wrong, which you’d probably have to go out if your way to do, so you’re probably fine).
Genuinely the only downside to using a non POSIX compliant shell is that you won’t learn the standard stuff so you won’t be as good at writing and reading scripts. It’s truly not too big of a deal. Fish (non POSIX compliant) is what Arch (or at least Cachy) used by default. It’s been great. The defaults are useful. To get a similar experience with POSIX shells I typically have to use zsh with oh-my-zsh and some plugins. Fish does it all out of the box.
So don’t worry about it!
Okay so first there was Unix. It was semi Open Source and a bunch of companies were making different versions that were becoming increasingly incompatible. That is why POSIX was created, it standardizes major parts of Unix. Linux is a Unix like operating system, meaning it functions similarly but doesn’t share any code. One thing that POSIX standardizes is the shell meaning there’s a standard how a loop works etc. Most shell on Linux like bash and zsh are POSIX compliant but some (like fish aren’t). This means a command that works one way in bash might work differently in fish. Basic stuff is mostly the same in my experience so if you’re not having any problems you shouldn’t worry about being POSIX compliant. If you want most of the same stuff but POSIX compliant checkout zsh. Fish provides documentation for adjusting your commands so I’d just ignore it until you run into a problem and then take a look at the docks
Laughs in still needing to write POSIX scripts
source, I use debian with fish and I write my scripts still in POSIX since fish is god slow at scripting, it is really nice for interactive usage but scripting performace is bad, and I can’t assume bash to be everywhere so POSIX I go
Nah, fuck that. I’m using yash.
Feels difficult to breathe. 🤭
I really like Fish but for simple stuff like youtube-dl you always have to put quotation marks around the YouTube video’s address because Fish thinks the question mark is an operator. So annoying.
Fixed in fish 4.0 :)
Fixed in fish 4.0 :)
*reinstalling Fish right now*
reinstalling Fish right now
Alright:
> /usr/bin/fish --version fish, version 4.0.1For whatever reason openSUSE doesn’t ship 4.0.2 despite the fact that it’s in its development repo since months. Oh well, could be worse.
Ask the maintainer to push the update to Factory.
Of course if you do find yourself in need of a single char wildcard or by extenaion a fixed length wildcard, you just don’t have that in fish.
yeah, and ripgrep with regex operators.
using nushell is my little rebellion against POSIX tyranny
POSIX Defiant
Non English speaker here . don’t you mean “non POSIX compliant” instead of “POSIX non compliant” ?or is it a hint at the fact that it is designed to actually be non compliant?
“non-POSIX compliant” = compliant with non-POSIX (whatever “non-POSIX” may be)
“POSIX non-compliant” = not compliant with POSIX
The best way to say what OP did would be a simple “not POSIX compliant”. Looking back, that’s exactly what was said in the post. The meme itself is, unfortunately a different story.
Posix non-compliant was used in the meme because the author wanted to save on words in the puchline. “Using a shell not POSIX compliant” lacks a few words and is syntactically incorrect. “Using a POSIX non-compliant shell” saves on words, and is syntactically correct, but makes the sentence more complex.
All in all, the “non-” prefix is a bit finicky in english and can usually be avoided.
Wouldn’t it be more like “non POSIX-compliant”? That’s how I would understand it, though I’m not a native speaker
This is the way I see it too. Treat “POSIX-compliant” as an adjective and negate it.
Honestly, I didn’t see it that way. With the dash, I do. That works as well. It’s just that, if I put a dash somewhere myself, it’s the other way around.
Generally, people mix the two, so you have to use context. I think, however, your take is correct. I think the post is meant to give a bit of a rebellious vibe, so that may be why they chose this phrasing.
Switching to dash
