Shell Choice

The Bourne shell is the only shell which is guaranteed to exist on a system. It is also the smallest shell. For these reasons, it is the preferred shell for scripting. Because it lacks many convenient features, it's also a poor choice for a login shell. Login shells are like St. Louis: your social status is determined by which school you're in. (And, furthermore, you're an idiot if you use a C shell[2]. -Ed.) The most prevalent shells are bash and tcsh. There is a strong case to be made for bash: it's available on a large number of systems, it uses the GNU readline package, and it makes sense to script and interact with related (i.e., Bourne-derived) shells. However, the strongest case is for the shell with which you're most comfortable.