On Sun, Apr 01, 2001 at 06:20:13PM +0100, Gavin Hamill wrote: > > echo -ne "Restarting apache web server: " > <some stuff> > echo "done" > > And get this output: > > Restarting apache web server: done > > instead of this > > Restarting apache web server: > done yes but a much more portable way to do this is to use printf: printf "Restarting apache web server: " <some stuff> echo "done" echo is notoriously inconsistent across *nix platforms. and the SUS (single unix specification) has or at least did mandate that echo should interpret no command line switches, when potato was unstable ash was altered to follow that, but had to be reverted since the startup process started looking like this: -ne Restarting apache web server: done but ash asside you can't depend on echo doing anything but echoing plain text with a trailing newline, thats all it does consistently. anything special use printf instead. > And anyway, why would you want to insist on 'ash' ? its smaller, faster and just does posix. i can think of no reason why ANY initscript requires a bashism, you can do some really complicated things in pure posix that work perfectly in ash. initscripts should be plain posix shell scripts with no bashisms, and should have #!/bin/sh as the interpreter, this way you can link /bin/sh to ash without any problems. (this is perfectly allowable, and i think is even a config question on woody's ash) if the script DOES have a bashism then it should have #!/bin/bash so a non-bash /bin/sh does not break it. but using #!/bin/bash for no good reason is just lame. > sh doesn't always provide the features scripts need, but bash does, and > thus it's the default for most scripts, because we can guarantee it will > be present without needing a Depends: ash line for each .deb. if the script needs to do anything non-posix, ie a bashism then it should use #!/bin/bash as the interpreter, never assume /bin/sh == /bin/bash. as far as initscripts i would like to see an example where a bashism is required for the script to work. (where the bashism could not be replaced with proper posix) -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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