* Craig Sanders said: > > > This discussion has prompted me to think about this problem > > > differently, however. > > > > I use sash on my machine at home as a root shell and ash on the > > machines at work. Both pose no problems with the shell scripts. They > > are just root shells, not system default shells. > > i said root cron jobs, not the init.d scripts. > > e.g. someone who's been running debian for years and has various > bashisms and posixisms in /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root - root's shell > has always been bash on debian so that is a fairly common situation. > changing root's shell to sash will immediately break those cron jobs. I missed that point. You're right - it is a problem. > easily fixed by setting "SHELL=/bin/bash" or "SHELL=/bin/sh" in the > crontab...but to do that, you first need to know there's a problem and > you probably won't know that until after a few cron jobs have failed. Well, that's a matter of setting up a proper environment for the cron invocation and can be done in its startup script. cron extracts SHELL from it's environment and uses it to exec scripts. Two ways out of it: 1. modify cron to stick to /bin/sh (not good) 2. pass it SHELL=/bin/sh on the invocation time: SHELL=/bin/sh cron And these modifications are up to the debian maintainers, not the users. As the statics will be (if they are accepted) in the upcoming release, everyone upgrading to the new debian release won't see any difference. > there's no need to set root's shell to sash, and it presents some fairly > obvious dangers. if someone wants to do it on their own system, that's > fine - but debian systems should NOT automatically break just because a > package has been installed. Well, after thinking about all what was written in this thread, I must agree with you. sash isn't required to be root's shell - it's enough if it is available and one can use it even if dynamics fail or in single mode (the bootmanager issue mentioned earlier in the thread). marek
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