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Comment by vvpan | Hacker News Reader

I recommended fish to some my younger coworkers recently only for somebody very senior to point out that they will be very confused copy-pasting commands meant for bash from the internet and them not working. He is right, I will hold off recommending fish. You have to know you are very ready for a new shell.

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Someone should tell the very senior dev that nothing stops you from running “bash” if you need to paste scripts.

Minor errors stop juniors and people not used to the shell - they have no idea why something failed or really want to bother looking into it.

About the only common case for single line commands is that fish uses (cmd) instead of $(cmd) for subshells. Anything longer than that you should probably be pasting it into a file and executing that.

Replying to myself: I don’t get the downvotes here. One-liner Bash commands I stumble across almost always work as-is in Fish. A while back they added support for

  FOO=bar cmd

to run cmd with the env var FOO set to bar, and that was the single biggest incompatibility I routinely stumbled across. Most commands you find in random docs tend to be that simple, and most work just as if you’d run them under Bash. But if it’s a large, complex command with if statements and for loops, etc., you’re better off pasting it into a file, then tweaking it to run under Fish or just running it directly via Bash.

Mmm, I don’t love this advice.

I think the error messages fish gives out in these cases (usually related to quotations) explain the problem pretty well.

I would probably recommend it like this: “I like using fish as my shell, if you want to try it out make sure you read the tutorial and generally understand that it’s not designed to be 100% bash/zsh compatible.”

I picked up fish as a junior level engineer as well, it wasn’t very hard to adapt.

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