In Catalina, Apple made ZSH the default shell, however, macOS retained the (now deprecated) Bash. Despite my attempts to unearth something related to this, I couldn't find out whether Big Sur will keep Bash in fresh installations or remove it altogether.
Is there any official word out there regarding this? At the very least (…and FWIW), any anecdotal experience coming from beta installations? Thank you.
Best Answer
There's some misconceptions that need to be cleared up:
ZSH is the default for shell for new users in Catalina, however, for existing users, the Bash shell remains the users' current shell.
Bash is not deprecated in any way. It is still current and the version that ships with macOS is perfectly fine. The reason that Bash is "so old" is because of the GPL license version. Apple switched to ZSH for this same reason.
There's no "official word" on something that's not even projected to happen. As for anecdotal evidence, I cite
cron
; it has been deprecated since Snow Leopard in favor oflaunchd
. We're in Catalina now ancron
is still around and fully functional.It's also important to note that there is a difference between deprecated and no longer supported.
cron
is deprecated meaning that while still supported, there's no more development on it and admins/users should start migrating to the new tool(s) (launchd
).Just because Apple makes a move to support a more modern technology, doesn't mean they are going resect it from their base code so it's not longer available in future versions.