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.
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.
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
Hell yeah! Thanks for the background info and the link to the documentation!
“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!
Hell yeah, I don’t really mess with scripts much yet but I do love to be non standard. Thanks for the run down!
zsh with oh-my-zsh addon can do the same amount of pretty colours and qol stuff, with the addition of being POSIX compliant. Not that fish is bad or anything, but you don’t want additional troubles with random incompatibility on top of the usual learning curve.
Thanks for the recommendation! I always end up doing things the hard way anyway lol
Feels difficult to breathe. 🤭
POSIX Defiant
?#!/usr/bin/env bashThen you’re just running bash scripts with bash. You’re not running bash scripts with fish.
I think that’s the point of the comment
Exactly, use the shell you like (nushell in my case), write POSIX scripts for maintainability, and use shebangs so you don’t have to think about it.
If you like fish but don’t use it as your login shell because it’s not POSIX you’re missing the point of the shebang
Write POSIX scripts for portability*, maintainability doesn’t depend much on the shell
POSIX for the system, Fish for the interaction is how I like my OS :3
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.
Maybe later
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.
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.
POSIX shell sucks ass. Just because there are many worse options doesn’t make it any better.
I love my bash-isms.
Nah, fuck that. I’m using yash.
Chaotic lawful.
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
using nushell is my little rebellion against POSIX tyranny
POSIX tryanny? Lmao
I’m sorry I can’t hear you over my eshell
It’s installed on my machine but really don’t know how to make use of it that much. Any tips and tricksters?
While using the fish shell you can just type ‘help’, and it’ll pull up an offline web page with their manuals and guides. But to be honest, I dont really use fish for anything but the fancy colors and auto-completion lol. Also fish 🐟 :)
oh yeah! the autocompletion seems great
Switching to dash
I’d rather use cash
Isn’t the list of shells that are “not fully POSIX compliant” basically every shell in modern use aside from sh?
