Having been an Ubuntu user for many years, a new OS is taking some getting used to. Although there is a nice quickstart guide for Linux users on the FreeBSD website, there are still some things that are muscle memory for me that is requiring some more time.
They are mostly around shell differences. sh is definitely not bash. I understand why bash isn’t in the base system due to licensing and a preference for simple solutions, but sh has a few limitations that seem to bite me. The one that has been particularly annoying has been treatment of history.
In bash, I’m used to using !$ to get the last argument from what I just wrote. A handy little shortcut for sure. Another is !<number> where number is the number in the output of the history so you can rerun a command easily. I’m not sure how to do this in sh.
Due to little things like this and the overall dearth of information about how to use sh effectively online, I’ll likely switch to zsh or something else. I’ll do some research into what makes the most sense.
A weird difference is the shutdown command. There are a couple of different ways to shutdown a system in Ubuntu. I’ve used shutdown -h now for a long time. This halts the system and shuts the power off.
On FreeBSD, that command just halts the system but doesn’t power it down. To power it down, you use shutdown -p now. That seems more correct, but I’ll need to change my habits to make sure I don’t just leave a system halted but powered on.
Lastly, there is no vim in the FreeBSD base system, just vi. I’m not sure why that is but it might be, again, the preference for the tried and true. I’ll look into whether or not vim makes sense to add to my system as I’m much more familiar with it.