* Steve Lamb said: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > On Fri, 16 Apr 1999 12:45:09 -0400 (EDT), shaleh@clifford.livenet.net wrote: > > >> >The idea is to use bash functions, for example: > > >> And if bash isn't installed? > > >Removing bash is almost impossible. > > Says who? On both my main machine and my laptop /bin/sh is now ash, not > bash. Nothing has broken since then at all that I am aware of. The only > change I made was the symlink from bash to ash, that's it. Since we're at the issue of removing bash, I think it would be a good idea to install two copies of bash - one statically linked and one dynamically. The statically linked version should be used for the root account because should the dynamic loading fail even booting in single mode wouldn't help (that's assuming you want to boot with your usual / device mounted). I had such a situation when I was upgrading to glibc2.1. Accidentaly I left the old bash on the disk and thoughtlessly rebooted the machine. When it came to login prompt I couldn't get my shell prompt since the new glibc library broke the old bash dependencies and it refused to load. I had to boot from the rescue disk and copy the new bash extracted from .deb by hand. Well, sure, I found the solution but such a situation should NEVER happen. At least the root account should be guaranteed to work even if the normal users' shells fail. Or perhaps the single mode should use statically linked ash or some even smaller shell for maintenance? For the moment, no maintenance is possible if bash dynamic dependencies fail somehow. Perhaps I have overlooked something and there is a standard way in the current Debian dists to boot and login as root even if dynamic libraries fail. regards, marek
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