Bruce Park <bpark79@hotmail.com> [2002-11-09 21:26:51 -0500]: > > I plan to install bash and tcsh. I'm currently running bash under > redhat(I'm waiting to for a new release for debian) and I use it all the > time. The only reason why I want the original UNIX shells is to test some > scripts that I'm writing. Ah! I think the light comes on for most of the readers of the list. Portability testing. And you want to test to make sure it works under the old and venerable Bourne shell. Which is wonderful. But also a problem. You might as well give up in dispair right now. The old Bourne shell is not free software. Therefore only commercial proprietary systems have it available. You won't find it in a Debian system for this reason. In fact I know not of any free software based system that has the Real Thing available. Since only rewritten clones are available anyone that has taken the time to rewrite the old Bourne /bin/sh will have taken the time to make it a modern standard conforming /bin/sh. (However, perhaps someone can prove me wrong.) In order to find a Real Thing copy of the Bourne shell you would need to run on a commercial proprietary system which still has the legacy executables on the system. And it would probably need to be an old system at that. Most commercial systems have dropped the Bourne shell and converted to the POSIX /bin/sh shell in order to confirm to the modern standards. If the system claims POSIX conformance then you have a POSIX /bin/sh and not the Bourne flavor. Although some systems ship something like /usr/old/bin/sh or similar things in a "break glass in case of emergency" type of situation. They are not really expected to be used. A better plan IMNHO is to target a modern standard /bin/sh. That will run on probably every system you care about. If you have a particular system which is old then include it specifically in your target group and test there. Also, more portability problems will come from things outside of the shell syntax than from within it. The real problems are assumptions about which md5sum the system uses or whether egrep is in /bin or /usr/bin and other such things that differ between systems. Stick with the standard middle of the road syntax, make as few assumptions as possible, test during development on at least three widely different systems and you should be as good at portability as anyone can possibly expect. Bob
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