Apple replaces bash with zsh as the default shell in macOS Catalina

theverge.com

51 points·laktak··9 comments

I'm not familiar with zsh. Can someone explain the implications of this? Will it, for example, disrupt the sharing of scripts with peers on Linux machines?

If you put a shebang in your shell scripts, then you have nothing to worry about.

Except the article suggested they might remove bash from macOS altogether at some point, which would make that a pain

That would be unfortunate, and would probably require /bin/bash to be a symlink to either /bin/zsh or /bin/sh to prevent many scripts from failing. For portability reasons, I always use #!/bin/sh unless I actually use some bash feature(s), but a lot of scripts explicitly invoke bash even when they don't have to.

They already are stuck at some version of Bash that's been out of date for almost a decade because Bash changed its licensing on the newer releases.

Right, but some of us care more about cross-compatibility in our shell than shiny new features

In my experience, unless you extensively customize bash, you won’t notice the change except to be pleasantly surprised by a few bits nicer UI. At the poweruser end, zsh is more configurable and dramatically nicer to configure (and documented a bit better).

For the most part, bash scripts work without modification in zsh.

Some Linux distributions already use "dash" instead of "bash", though dash is much more compatible.

Edit: debian does it. More info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dash

It's worth pointing out they use dash for scripts that do not explicitly require bash .

The default interactive shell is still bash

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