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Re: autotools



Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> wrote:

> You don't have to perform a separate check for an "empty item list".  This
> is perfectly valid, and will do nothing:
>
>   words=""
>   for i in $words; do echo hello, world; done
>
> If Solaris's shell is giving any output or errors from the commands above,
> then it's crap.  (Which means autoconf would have to work around it.)
>
> For Joerg: the fact that Solaris does NOT put its POSIX-compliant shell
> in /bin/sh is a source of unending pain.  Since you can't use
>
>   #!PATH=`getconf PATH`; sh
>
> in a script, it's useless in real life.  Real scripts have to put SOMETHING
> on the shebang line, and the only thing we can use is
>
>   #!/bin/sh
>
> Gods, how I wish POSIX had mandated something like "posix-shell"....

You still have to learn a lot on standards....

There have been at least 3 attempts to standardize #!xxxx in order to find
a way to distribute POSIX compliant shell scripts. It was not possible to find
a way to do this without breaking POSIX.

The fact that Solaris still has a Bourne shell in /bin/sh is no POSIX 
noncompliance but rather something that helps with backwards compatgibility.
Note that ksh93 is not compatible to the Bourne Shell. Platforms that
change /bin/sh fro the Bourne shell to something else just do not care about
their customers....

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js@cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de     (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily



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