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Interview with Brian Fox, Author of the Bash Shell

posted by mrpg on Saturday December 16 2017, @03:09PM   
from the #! dept.

canopic jug writes:

Lifehacker has an Interview with Brian Fox, the author of the Bash shell.

Brian Fox is a titan of open source software. As the first employee of Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation, he wrote several core GNU components, including the GNU Bash shell. Now he’s a board member of the National Association of Voting Officials and co-founder of Orchid Labs, which delivers uncensored and private internet access to users like those behind China’s firewall. We talked to him about his career and how he works.

[...] I first recall being interested in technology at the age of 6. My father, a physicist at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, had a teletype machine in the basement of the house we were living in. It connected to BBN via a modem. The baud rate was probably around 110bps—quite low. I used to hold down the CTRL key while pressing “G”, which would cause the bell to ring.

[...] I joined with my other 4 co-founders in 2017 to create the Orchid Protocol for a truly decentralized, surveillance-free internet.

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Original Submission

• Is he black, or cuban or something? Is he black, or cuban or something? (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:36PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:36PM (#610742)

  Either way somebody could make lots of jokes about backdooring you, given all the holes in bash since... 2.0 came out?

  That big exploit a few years back I had actually been warned about back in the 90s by a friend as a reason to use some other shell.

  Of course since all the shell scripts on linux REQUIRED bash features, sometimes even while referencing /bin/sh, instead of /bin/bash, I never migrated off it, because rewriting every shell script when I barely knew any shell scripting would have been impossible for me.

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• Re:Is he black, or cuban or something? (Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Saturday December 16 2017, @07:49PM

  by requerdanos (5997) on Saturday December 16 2017, @07:49PM (#610772) Journal

  shell scripts on linux REQUIRED bash features, sometimes even while referencing /bin/sh

  I don't know about all the linuces* in the world, but in Debian and derivatives, /bin/sh isn't bash. (it isn't sh either; it's dash.)

  $ cat /etc/debian_version ;file /bin/sh
  buster/sid
  /bin/sh: symbolic link to dash

  Dash is a smaller shell that loads faster/depends on fewer libraries/has fewer features than bash; the Debian folks say that switching to dash results in a faster system boot time given that (faster loading time) * (many scripts loaded during boot) = less time to boot.

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  * operating systems based on linux kernel + gnu userland

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