On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 11:24:18PM -0600, Paul E Condon wrote: > Recent mentions of dash on this list prompted me to try to learn more > about it. I googled and learned that it has a different convention for > indicating that a file is a script that should be processed by > dash. This affects only the first line of a script. > > Is this the only difference in coding scripts? I know it is said to be > smaller and faster, which is good, but are there things that need to > be changed in a bash script, after the first line, in order to make it > into a proper dash script? What are they? Where can I learn what to > change in my scripts? Or is it just smaller and faster with no > conversion pain? > > I'm actually not sure of the change in the first line. That is something > that I inferred from some puzzling words in an email about getting a > dash script to work that were made on a Ubuntu list back in 2006. > > I feel uncomfortable being so totally ignorant about an impending change > in Debian. I want to read something, but can't find anything to read. from my understanding dash is a posix compliant shell bash isn't - well it has whats called bash-isms all scripts that work in sh should work in dash and bash dash should work in bash not all bash scripts will work in sh or dash the first line is used to invoke a program to process the script for example #!/bin/bash says start /bin/bash to process the script #!/bin/dash etc #!/usr/bin/awk for awk #!/usr/bin/perl for perl etc etc there is name for this, but I can't remember it right now. Bashism - off the top of my head, I believe things like $(( - arithmetic expressions don't quote me on this - have a google :) > > -- The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children. -- Linus Torvalds
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