@Qmechanic No idea, because it unclear to me just what he's asking.

@Qmechanic Somewhere between unclear and too broad - if they're asking what I think they're asking it's too broad, but I'm not sure what exactly they want to know. Maybe close with a link to physics.stackexchange.com/q/92925/50583

@Qmechanic too broad. Maybe if he/she can provide a physics problem for which there is an issue.

@ACuriousMind grassmann calculus?

Hm ... Just looked at the link @Slereah provided to Joel's blog‌​.

@0celo7 That's not a question, what's the question mark doing there?

I'd read that before. Shortly after it came out, I think, but the thing I noticed this time is that Joel didn't tell us his one 'normal' driving case where a standard is better than an automatic!

Now, I'm pretty good with a stick-shift. I've even driven an antique commercial truck without syncromesh.

So I have my own opinions about when it is better (not cooler or more fun, but better), but I want to know Joel's thoughts on the matter.

@EmilioPisanty echo $SHELL yield the default shell for the system

you can also add a shebang at the top of the sh file to enforce a particular shell to be used

For BASH add this to the first line of your .sh file #!/usr/bin/env bash

@BernardoMeurer Er ... dones't $SHELL yield the name of the shell that you are current running?

Also, note that naming shell scripts .sh is bad practice, since shells are so different from one another. Either add no suffix or .bash (is using bash ofc)

@dmckee Not on my system at least :P

echo $0 is the shell in use

@ACuriousMind Ok. Grassmann calculus!

Hmm. Seems you are right. about $SHELL. Clearly I haven't done much shell scripting lately and I'm starting to recover.

Don't know if that is a good thing or a bad one.

I like shell scripting :P

Only recently I discovered there's a bash debugger

My bash manpage says

and if I try (unset SHELL; zsh; echo $SHELL)

I get no output, which suggests that it holds the name of the shell you first logged in with, unless manually adjusted.

The next step would be to change you default shell, log out and back in and see if the string changes.

But I'm too lazy for that.

$SHELL is the system default shell, you can change it wish chsh -s [NEW_SHELL]

But I recommend never doing that

Just set your terminal emulator to call a custom command instead of the default shell

You will thank me when your display server dies and you find out your fancy zsh theme doesn't work through ssh :P

@JohnRennie There's a theorem in calculus of variations called "balls have the smallest capacity"

or on the tty

My login and profile scripts are generally compatible with the bare POSIX shell. No bashisms in something as important as that.

@BernardoMeurer Fantano gave Rick Ross a mid-light 6

@0celo7 Savage

I agreed with him for the most part

@dmckee My zsh is heavily customized for comfort, and as such is incompatible with anything that isn't a modern terminal emulator (I use terminator)

I leave bash as vanilla as possible, except for a few .bashrc configs so that's what I use when I need compatibility

@BernardoMeurer I'm buying books.

Help.

Buy me Shankar

It's not on sale

@0celo7 buy Prudnikov

All five volumes

@EmilioPisanty echo $0 is the quick answer to your question if you don't want to go through all that up there :P

@BernardoMeurer I'll give it a go tomorrow

Thanks

@EmilioPisanty No worries, glad to help